Pianello

I’m not sure Pianello has ever had a tourist ask for directions before us, and honestly that’s the whole appeal. It sits inside Chiesanuova, itself the least visited of San Marino’s nine castelli, up on the western side of the country where the land softens into rolling farmland instead of cliff. We went looking for a hiking trail we’d read about online, more out of curiosity than any real plan, and ended up spending an afternoon walking dirt tracks between fields with absolutely no schedule to keep.

The hamlet itself is barely a hamlet — a scatter of farmhouses, a small chapel, a few working farms with dogs that came out to bark at us and then, having made their point, wandered off entirely uninterested. What Pianello actually offers is the countryside around it: low stone walls, sheep grazing on slopes that catch the afternoon sun at an angle that makes everything look slightly gilded, hedgerows thick enough that you lose the road behind you within a few minutes of walking. Lia, who grew up partly in rural France, kept saying it reminded her of home, which I think surprised her more than it did me — San Marino gets filed away in most people’s heads as one tiny walled city, and nobody expects it to have a corner that feels like the French countryside.

We did, in fact, get lost — the trail markers around Pianello are inconsistent at best, sometimes a painted stripe on a fence post, sometimes nothing at all for half a kilometer — and ended up on a track that dead-ended at someone’s private orchard. An older man came out, more curious than annoyed, and once he understood we were just wandering rather than trespassing on purpose, walked us back to the right path himself, pointing out a spring where he said the water was better than anything from a bottle. We drank from it. It was, in fact, very good, cold enough to ache in your teeth, and I’ve thought about that small kindness more than I’ve thought about most of the towers up on Monte Titano.

There’s genuinely nothing to “see” in Pianello in the way a guidebook means the word — no monument, no view famous enough to have a name. What there is instead is a version of San Marino that never makes it into anyone’s itinerary: quiet, agricultural, a little scruffy at the edges, populated by people who’ve farmed this same stretch of hillside for generations and don’t much care whether anyone visits.

When to go: Weekday mornings in spring, when the fields are green, the tracks aren’t muddy, and you’re unlikely to meet another walker for hours.