Borgo Maggiore
"Everyone else took the cable car up. I stayed down, found the market, and ate cheese standing up in a piazza that felt like it hadn't changed in forty years."
I arrived in San Marino, as most people do, by bus from Rimini, deposited at the cable car station in Borgo Maggiore with the expectation that the only direction worth traveling was up. The cable car itself is a pleasant three-minute ride that deposits you at the city gate and immediately begins the process of funneling you toward the towers and the souvenir shops. I did that, and it was fine, and then I came back down and spent the rest of the afternoon in Borgo Maggiore itself, which was considerably more interesting.
Wednesday is market day on the main piazza, and in April the stalls spread across the square in a cheerful commercial jumble: vegetables from the farms in Faetano and Fiorentino, local cheese including a soft semi-stagionato that I bought a wedge of and ate standing up, piadina bread from a woman who had apparently been operating the same portable press from the same spot for decades, and a row of fabric and clothing stalls where older Sammarinese women worked through the racks with the focused efficiency of people who shop markets seriously. The atmosphere was entirely local — not a souvenir in sight, no concessions to the tourists who were all, presumably, two hundred meters up the cliff looking at towers.
The piazza itself is handsome in the unassuming way of small Italian market towns — some Renaissance stonework around the church facade, a fountain, café tables with plastic chairs where old men were drinking morning coffee and not buying anything. The church of the Annunciation stands on the north side of the square, its baroque interior pleasantly cool and almost empty of visitors. I lit a candle for the general principle of the thing and sat in a pew for ten minutes listening to the market noise filter in through the open doors.
What Borgo Maggiore offered that the historic center above did not was a sense of actual habitation. People were doing their shopping, meeting their neighbors, arguing with their bank. A woman was walking a very small dog through the market with the air of someone who did this every Wednesday and had no particular interest in hurrying. A man was loading boxes into a van with the focused impatience of a delivery person running late. The mechanisms of ordinary life, conducted in a language that was Italian but with a slight Romagnolo accent and certain words I didn’t recognize.
The cable car ride back up, taken at dusk, offered a different view of Monte Titano than the morning ascent: the towers lit from below by the town’s floodlights, the cliff face going grey-violet in the failing light, the whole extraordinary silhouette of the ridge doing exactly what it has done every evening for seven hundred years.
When to go: Wednesday morning for the market, which runs until early afternoon. The town is pleasant any day but has less energy outside market days. The cable car runs from early morning to late evening and is worth taking in both directions — the views are different at each end of the day.