I went to San Marino to get away from Garibaldi. For here—I said to myself—is the one spot in Italy that is not Italy, that has kept its pristine Republicanism. Here on the Titan Mount is the one spot that cannot possibly acclaim the Union. At most I may encounter a memorial to Mazzini.

I left Rimini by the Gate of the Via Garibaldi which leads straight to San Marino, and trudging for the better part of a day I saw it impending horribly some two thousand five hundred feet above me, and after dragging myself through the Borgo or lower suburb, I toiled in the darkness up a narrow, steep, slippery, jagged path, on the brink of a sheer precipice, into—the Via Garibaldi! And in a bedroom looking down on it—for the only hotel is in a Piazzetta abutting on it—I passed the night.

In the morning I found a Garibaldi garden and a CaffÈ Garibaldi and a Piazza Garibaldi and a Garibaldi bust and a Garibaldi bas-relief and two Garibaldi tablets; item, a tablet to Victor Emmanuel and a centennial tablet and street to Mazzini, even a Via of GiosuÈ Carducci, the laureate of the Risorgimento.

Part of the explanation is that Garibaldi sought refuge here in 1849, escaping from “the Roman Republic” to the Ravenna pine-wood where poor Anita died, and his order for the day—“Soldiers, we are on a Soil of Refuge,” and his letter of thanks from Caprera—“I go away proud to be a citizen of so virtuous a Republic”—are reproduced on the tablets. But the deeper cause of this sympathy is that San Marino is Italian through and through, and its hoary independence, real enough in the days of the city states, is become a farce solemnly played with separate postage stamps and currency, Regents, Councils, militia, peers, commons, Home and Foreign Secretaries, ribbons, orders, treaties, extradition treaties and a diplomatic corps in England, Austria-Hungary, Spain, France and Italy, all to cover its budget of £11,000 and its population of 10,422 souls, enumerated from week to week in the toy press and decreasing by dozens. ’Tis a game into which all Europe has entered in high good humour, the grand farÇeur, Napoleon, even proposing to extend the Republic’s boundaries, which comprise only thirty-three square miles. But the Sammarinese had sense enough to see that a greater realm would be treated more seriously. Mount Titan, as the seat not of a toy capital but of something answering less humorously to its name, would cease to be a joke, whereas a State less than one-fourth of the Isle of Wight might remain for Europe a blessed land of diversion from the eternal earnestness of the sword, might even save Europe’s self-respect as a region of civilisation, regardful of treaties and ancient rights. So serious in fact did the Sammarinese consider the danger of being taken seriously, that Antonio Onofri who advised against this Napoleonic inflation stands immortalised as Pater PatriÆ.

No doubt the inaccessibility of Mount Titan must have been the origin of San Marino’s existence in those dim days of the Diocletian persecution, when the Roman Matron, Felicita, whom the stone-cutter Marinus had converted to Christianity, “made him a present of the mountain.” And the same inaccessibility which suited it for a Christian colony contributed later to the success of its traditional policy of balancing between the Rimini Malatestas and the Dukes of Urbino. But what prevented Austria from following Garibaldi into San Marino? What but its enjoyment of the game, or its desperate clinging to that shred of self-respect? To-day when the cycle of history has brought us round again to the period of Ezzelino, when the intellectual or religious concepts, which anciently veiled usurpations, are contemptuously thrown aside, and the iron hand crushes in mockery of the combined Jurists of Europe, what stands between San Marino and extinction? Only the environing Italy. And Italy plays with the tiny Republic as a father plays with a child. San Marino has two mortars in the fortress of La Rocca—for what is a State without artillery to fire on solemn occasions?—and these mortars were presented by Victor Emmanuel III. Italy also receives the more desperate criminals, who are boarded out in its prisons, as it supplies the police from its reserve soldiers, and the Judge from its lawyers. Italy has provided its only distinguished citizens—they are honorary,—its national hymn was taken from Guido of Arezzo, the inventor of the musical scale, and when the beautiful if mimetic Palazzo Pubblico for the Regents and the Council was opened in 1894, it was with a speech of Carducci.

Yet “Liberty,” I found, was the keynote of San Marino. Liberty was the motto of its arms, with their three mountains and plumed towers. Liberty waved in the white and blue flag and was painted on the shields of the palace corridors. S. Marino, the author of Liberty, was commemorated in the cathedral faÇade with its flourish of Sen. P. Q., and Liberty cried from the scroll his statue flourished. “In tuenda Libertate vigilis” warned the inscription over the court room; “animus in consulendo Liber” counselled the medallion near the tribune, and in choice Latin epigraphs the transient tyrant, CÆsar Borgia, impugner of Liberty, was denounced and derided. Sublime it was to stand before the Gothic Palace of the Regents, on this dizzy Piazza della LibertÀ with its gigantic statue of Liberty (her hand on her bannered spear), and to behold the sheer abyss below, and as from an aeroplane the marvellous panorama of sea and mountain around, Liberty written in every rugged convolution and glacial peak, and shimmering in every masterless wave. And yet my imagination refused to play the game; refused to take with becoming reverence the crowned and gilded pew of the Regents, the historic frescoes and friezes, the blue and orange of the “Guarda Nobile,” the kÉpis and bayonets of the militia, the red facings of the police. All this parade of “Libertas” was in inverse proportion to the substance, or even to the power of securing it. The Republic appeared like a banknote without gold behind it, and an Italian banknote at that; never so essentially Italian as in the lapidary literature asserting its separateness. This grand Palace, this costly Cathedral, both built only within the last few years simultaneously with the motor road that has destroyed the last semblance of isolation, seemed like that spasm of self-assertiveness which so often precedes extinction. And I thought that conquering nations might well mark how easily love can melt what hate would only harden. Imagine if Italy had brought her mortars against San Marino instead of presenting them to it, or if she had made a road for her mortars instead of for her motors!

But as an antique curio San Marino is delightful. I love to muse on the pomp of its Regents who are elected—like the Doges of Venice—by a mixture of choice and chance, and go in state to celebrate mass, clothed in satin breeches and velvet mantle, in doublet and sword and ermined cap, accompanied by the Noble Guard and the high officers of State, and then from the Cathedral, still to the clashing of church bells and the strains of military music, to their semestral thrones in the Palazzo Pubblico; there to hear a speech from the Government Orator—whose fee is four shillings—and to take the Latin oath not to tamper with the Libertas of the Constitution, and to receive the State seals and keys and the insignia of Grand Masters of the Order of San Marino, perhaps even the first instalment of the royal budget of a pound a month.

No autocrats are these Regents, despite their regal salary. They are mere constitutional monarchs, official headpieces to the Arringo or sovereign Council in which the real power resides. But though Republican, San Marino is not Democratic, for the Arringo fills up its vacancies by option. Liberty is not flouted however, for may not every head of a family—after the half-yearly elections—give the Arringo a piece of his mind? Time was when the citizen could stroll into its sittings and tender it the benefit of his advice, but this form of Liberty seems to have been found too excessive and cumbersome even for the land of Libertas.

Happy are the nations that have no history, and San Marino seems to have escaped almost without an anecdote. In 1461 Pope Pius II invited it to make war with the Magnificent Monster, Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini, and rewarded its aid with four castles. CÆsar Borgia came and went in 1503, a nocturnal attack by Fabiano del Monte was repulsed in 1543, and after that nothing appears to have happened till 1739, when the Cardinal Legate, Giulio Alberoni, occupied the Republic. But the Republic having appealed to the Pope was left free again, Clement XII thus becoming a national hero with his bust in the Palazzo. But national heroes of its own it has none. It has adopted the cult of Garibaldi, though he preaches Italian Unity, and made honorary citizens of Canova, Rossini and Verdi, and it has almost appropriated the famous numismatist, Bartolommeo Borghesi, who did at least live here, if he omitted to be born here, and who dominates one of the wonderful mountain-terraces, holding a book and gazing carefully at the only point where there is no view. But as to the “Viri Clarissimi et Illustres Castri Sancti Marini” blazoned on the Palazzo staircase, between shields of “Libertas,” I fear their celebrity had not reached me. Doctors, artists, counts, dignitaries of the Church—I was impartially ignorant of them all.

What is to account for this paucity of personalities? Had a great saint or a great poet arisen here, we should have explained it glibly by the pious isolation among the eternal mountains, looking down upon the eternal sea, under the everlasting stars. Had a new Acropolis or a new Parthenon risen on this hill of the Titan, we should not have lacked proofs of the inevitability of the new Athens. But nothing has arisen. Giambittisti Belluzzi, the military architect of its walls and of the Imperial Castle at Pesaro, is San Marino’s highest name in art, while in literature its chroniclers point to Canon Ignazio Belzoppi, “letterato di molta fama,” born in 1762, author of the heroi-comic poem, “Il Bertuccino” (The Little Monkey)—unpublished!

For life to be perfect then, small circles are not enough, pace my friend BoËthius. They must tingle with life, perhaps even with death. Can it be that the advocatus diaboli was right, and that the snug security of a diplomatic mountain-fastness has bred mediocrity? I tell him angrily that the place is a Paradise and he answers calmly that it is only a Parish. Can it be that the only Paradise possible is a Fools’ Paradise?

But a serpent has entered Eden, crawling probably by the motor-car road. He has insinuated doubt of holy authority and the Sammarinese begin to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Il Titano is the organ of the Socialists—a Titan in revolt—and the Somarino serves the Clericals—with the accent on the Santo. “Preti!!!” is the ejaculatory title of an article in the number of Il Titano that came into my hands (April 24, 1910). “We might say impostors, falsifiers, canaille,” it begins pleasantly, “but we say instead ‘Priests,’ which is a substantive that comprises all the others.”

And thus across its precipices San Marino joins hands with “Young Italy,” whose programme according to the organ of that name embraces the exiling of the Vatican beyond the frontiers of Italy, the sweeping away of the bankrupt remains of Christianity, and the abandonment of Imperialism and the African adventure. I will engage there are even Futurists in San Marino.