Montale

Most people don’t walk to Montale. The tourist itinerary — buy the combined ticket, climb Guaita, walk to Cesta, walk back — is the established circuit, and Montale is positioned just south of Cesta and always described as a watchtower that is closed to visitors, which in travel terms means it gets left off the list. This is exactly why I wanted to go. I followed the path from La Cesta south for another twenty minutes, past the point where the path becomes unmaintained and the signs stop, until the third tower appeared around a curve in the ridge: small, cylindrical, bristling with no particular drama, standing on a shelf of rock at the very end of the promontory.

Montale is the oldest of the three towers and the tallest in proportion to its footprint — a slim cylinder of pale limestone, fourteenth century, which served as a surveillance post rather than a fortification and was apparently also used as a prison, which seems plausible given how isolated it feels even now. You cannot enter it. The door is locked, the windows are narrow, and the small sign at the gate explains with cheerful brevity that the tower is private and visits are not permitted. Standing outside a locked medieval tower at the end of a limestone ridge looking out over rural Italy is, I discovered, an entirely satisfying way to spend forty minutes.

What you gain from visiting Montale is mostly atmospheric — the sense of having gotten to the end of something, having walked beyond the tourist infrastructure and into a part of the ridge that belongs, for a moment, only to whoever is standing in it. The views from the base of the tower look south and west into the Montefeltro, the ancient region of hills that runs toward Urbino. In the afternoon light those hills go gold in a way that has nothing to do with San Marino as a destination and everything to do with the particular quality of light over the Marche in spring.

I sat against the base of the wall for a while and ate an apple and watched a red kite work the thermals off the cliff face below. There was no other person visible in any direction. The wind moved through the scrub oak along the ridge with a dry, rattling sound. San Marino, from Montale, is simply a mountain ridge with a tower on it, which is exactly what it has been since the fourth century, and the thought made me feel calmer than I had any reasonable expectation of feeling.

On the walk back to La Cesta, I passed two German hikers coming the other direction, moving with the purposeful speed of people who had checked Montale off a list without quite understanding what they were checking off. I thought about stopping them to explain the red kite and the quality of the afternoon light. I decided they would find their own reasons to stop.

When to go: The walk from La Cesta to Montale takes about twenty minutes each way on a clear path, and it is worth doing in any season. In winter the views are exceptional — the Apennines snow-capped to the west, the Adriatic a cold grey band in the east — but the path can be slippery. Avoid July and August afternoons when the path is full sun and there is no shade.