San Marino

Liberty on a mountaintop: the world's oldest surviving republic, founded by a stonemason in 301.

San Marino traces its existence to the year 301, when, by tradition, a Christian stonemason named Marinus fled the persecutions of the emperor Diocletian and founded a small community on the slopes of Mount Titano. From that legend grew a self-governing commune whose institutions, above all the two Captains Regent elected every six months, have endured with remarkable continuity for some seventeen centuries, giving San Marino its claim to be the world's oldest surviving sovereign republic. Protected by its mountain isolation and a tradition of shrewd, watchful diplomacy, the little state survived the rise and fall of the Papal States, the unification of Italy that closed in around it, and the upheavals of the modern age. Napoleon offered to enlarge it and was politely refused; Abraham Lincoln was made an honorary citizen; Giuseppe Garibaldi was given refuge; and in the Second World War the republic, though neutral and bombed, sheltered some hundred thousand refugees. Today San Marino is a UN member that uses the euro and mints its own coins, an enclave entirely surrounded by Italy whose freedom rests on treaties of friendship and on a continuity unbroken since the Middle Ages.