San Marino / Bologna to Venice, Italy

Even if I haven’t visited most of northern Italy before, you could say that it’s a known quantity. Everyone knows someone who’s visited or wants to visit. Everyone knows how good the food is. Everyone’s probably learned at least some of the history in school — whether it be about artistic figures, religion, war, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance… Much has been said, and there’s not much for me to add.

I won’t lie, my main interests don’t exactly lie in these things, even if I can enjoy or have appreciation for them. What brings me to this area, and what’s kept me going in spite of peak season crowds and extreme heat, are friends: one who moved back to Italy from Canada, one who happens to be in town, Italian friends from Canada getting married and all our mutual friends in town for that wedding, and one guiding me through her hometown in absentia. Same goes for Switzerland, a detour tacked onto the end to visit some more friends again. That made for a grand but overwhelming time of reunions and highlight after highlight threatening to blur into each other.

Most of those highlights are ones that I think best remain in our memories. But in between, there was some exploring too!

Aside from gorging on mortadella as a first meal after a week of halal food, despite its fame as a food destination, I didn’t do much in Bologna besides wander around, peeking into the giant cathedral (with a notably macabre fresco of demons eating humans), and taking long breaks hiding under the long porticoed streets or in air-conditioned clothing stores. Staying in between Bologna and Ferrara with my friend Erika, I took her recommendations for a perfect day in Ferrara: a wander through scenic cobblestone streets with a lovely lunch at her favourite spot overlooking the castle in the middle of town. That castle, as pretty as it Is with its moat, has a pretty mean story: the Castello Estense was built in the 1300s like a fortress by a paranoid lord who didn’t want to be accountable to the people. It even includes a dungeon for people he just didn’t like.

But it’s everything else that lingers more in my mind — the evenings at home with Erika and her partner Mattia, the post-dinner gelato crawl when everyone else in town has the same idea, going to a village sagra with her family… but most of all, the unquantifiable and unphotographable: seeing just how different and how much warmer socializing with people familiar and unfamiliar can be. There’s always trade-offs in any place to live, but seeing how much joy surrounds her here, I understand more now what drew her back to Italy that Canada could not offer.

I couldn’t help it. San Marino is a fairly long day trip from Bologna, but I had to know: why is this a country? It’s a tiny speck (only bigger than Vatican City and Monaco) completely surrounded by Italy, which is the only way in and out — even if you fly. How does it act independently?

Honestly though, being there didn’t really help answer those questions.

Passing a basically invisible border, I was surprised though that the bus passed through multiple towns (an outlet mall, an industrial area, some residential areas) before getting to the capital: a small walled city perched high up on a mountain top, visible from afar. There’s three towers along the ridge, and climbing two of them provided some beautiful views (almost all the way to the Mediterranean, despite some haze) and a kitschy medieval flair.

Aside from that, there’s a ton of touristy restaurants and strangely enough, a bunch of shops selling guns and knives. Probably a legal loophole thing for the Italian day trippers, not so much for the many international tourists. Everyone here speaks Italian, but there’s a whole lot more English for the visitors. There’s a couple museums too — a state museum carrying a bunch of Italian and international art donated to them, and a coin and stamp museum… and that’s it? What about the story of San Marino? Nothing about it being the only city-state which got to keep its independence, thanks to safely harbouring Napoleon and Garibaldi in the past and having their protection during Italian unification in return? Even that little bit of information, I had to search for online. What about its political neutrality, or how they function being yoked to a much larger and influential neighbour?

While there’s some university buildings nestled by the old capital’s government buildings and tourist shops, it doesn’t really look like there are any residents, save for one tiny shop selling groceries. Everyone lives below in the other towns, in a traffic-laden sea of suburbia home to more cars than people. There’s definitely pride in being Sammarinese: they most visibly represent themselves at the Olympics, and even Eurovision (though… usually with foreign artists for hire). It’s a beautiful and unique place and made for a fun few hours, but it’s a shame how little of themselves they present to the visitor beyond pretty fortifications, cobblestone streets, and their flag.

Oh boy. Neither of us were really looking forward to this: the peak season crowds mixed with the stifling heat, the expense, Jeff Bezos’s wedding… but here we are. And it’s… great?!

With a narrow of window of time where Ivan, who was on his way home from a running race in the Dolomites, and I were in the same area, we settled on a quick 24 hours in Venice, from where he was flying back to Serbia. We didn’t know until too late that it’d be on the day a billionaire would cordon off half the city! Our focus was on catching up over the last three years since Mallorca, and we had no desire to see the sights, which we had already done before separately decades ago. “It’ll have to do” — a weird sentence for both of us to say for an internationally beloved (and over-beloved) destination.

We arrived just after the wedding and the anti-Bezos protests were over. The crowds? Not crazy likely due to the heat and the big private event. And as we wandered past canal after canal, past the shops, past the famous cathedral, down random side streets and across random bridges with no real destination in mind, the crowds dwindled further. Golden hour came, and we even had dead silence. It was a true joy to get lost, the atmosphere a mere dreamy backdrop to a compressed day of conversations on families and jobs and life. As darkness came, so did the crowds: lots of students at the drinking holes, locals taking walks in the cooler temperatures, and only Italian chatter to be heard, all amplifying as we approached midnight before we finally called it a night ourselves.

On Erika’s recommendation, we stopped at various bacari throughout the first evening and the second day, snacking on cicchetti ranging from simple to inspired, always with a glass of spritz, and often outside facing the water. Who knew that everyone in the world was right, that this would be a highlight of the trip?