Chiesanuova

Almost nobody who visits San Marino sees Chiesanuova, and that is precisely its appeal. The coaches grind up to the historic centre on Monte Titano, disgorge their passengers into the souvenir streets, and leave — and the other eight castelli, the administrative districts that make up this absurd and lovable little republic, are left more or less to themselves. Chiesanuova is the southwesternmost of them, a quiet sprawl of farmland and stone hamlets tipping down toward the Italian border, and I went there for the simple reason that the map showed almost nothing, which in my experience is usually a recommendation.

A castle that isn’t a castle

The word castello here is administrative, not architectural — Chiesanuova has no fairy-tale fortress, no battlements bristling with replica weaponry. What it has is hills: green, folded, agricultural hills that look across to the Apennines on one side and back up at the three famous towers of Monte Titano on the other. The little parish church that gives the place its name (Chiesanuova means, prosaically, new church) sits unremarkably at the centre, and the surrounding lanes wander between vineyards, olive trees and houses where actual San Marinese people are doing actual things that have nothing to do with the visiting public.

I parked badly, walked a loop of perhaps three kilometres, and met four people, all of whom said buongiorno without the faintest interest in whether I was a tourist. A man pruning a vine pointed me toward a viewpoint where you can see the whole republic laid out — all sixty-one square kilometres of it — with Italy rolling away beyond on every side. From up there the famous towers look almost toylike, and the whole conceit of the world’s oldest republic becomes briefly, gloriously visible: a country you can take in at a single glance.

The view back at Monte Titano

The real reward of Chiesanuova is the angle it gives you on everywhere else. Because it sits low and to the side, the dramatic profile of Monte Titano — that improbable limestone tooth with its three towers strung along the ridge — reveals itself fully, in a way you can never appreciate while standing on top of it. Late in the afternoon, with the light going amber and the towers catching it, I sat on a wall with a panino a farmer’s wife had sold me and watched the most photographed skyline in the republic from the one place nobody photographs it.

Lia, who had stayed up in the centre, texted me a picture of a gift shop selling air pistols and asked where I’d disappeared to. I sent back a photo of a field. She replied with a single word that I won’t translate, but the gist was that I had won. Chiesanuova is not a destination so much as an antidote — proof that even in a country measured in minutes, you can find a corner where nothing is for sale.

When to go

Late spring and early autumn are loveliest — May, June, September — when the hills are green or gold and the heat is bearable. San Marino is tiny enough that Chiesanuova is a fifteen-minute drive from the centre, so treat it as the calm half of a day that begins among the towers and crowds. Come on foot if you can; the lanes reward walking far more than driving.