I went to San Marino to get away from Garibaldi. For here—I said to
myself—is the one spot in Italy that is _not_ Italy, that has kept its
pristine Republicanism. Here on the Titan Mount is the one spot that
cannot possibly acclaim the Union. At most I may encounter a memorial to
Mazzini.
I left Rimini by the Gate of the Via Garibaldi which leads straight to
San Marino, and trudging for the better part of a day I saw it impending
horribly some two thousand five hundred feet above me, and after
dragging myself through the Borgo or lower suburb, I toiled in the
darkness up a narrow, steep, slippery, jagged path, on the brink of a
sheer precipice, into—the Via Garibaldi! And in a bedroom looking down
on it—for the only hotel is in a Piazzetta abutting on it—I passed the
night.
In the morning I found a Garibaldi garden and a Caffè Garibaldi and a
Piazza Garibaldi and a Garibaldi bust and a Garibaldi bas-relief and two
Garibaldi tablets; item, a tablet to Victor Emmanuel and a centennial
tablet and street to Mazzini, even a Via of Giosuè Carducci, the
laureate of the Risorgimento.
Part of the explanation is that Garibaldi sought refuge here in 1849,
escaping from “the Roman Republic” to the Ravenna pine-wood where poor
Anita died, and his order for the day—“Soldiers, we are on a Soil of
Refuge,” and his letter of thanks from Caprera—“I go away proud to be a
citizen of so virtuous a Republic”—are reproduced on the tablets. But
the deeper cause of this sympathy is that San Marino is Italian through
and through, and its hoary independence, real enough in the days of the
city states, is become a farce solemnly played with separate postage
stamps and currency, Regents, Councils, militia, peers, commons, Home
and Foreign Secretaries, ribbons, orders, treaties, extradition treaties
and a diplomatic corps in England, Austria-Hungary, Spain, France and
Italy, all to cover its budget of £11,000 and its population of 10,422
souls, enumerated from week to week in the toy press and decreasing by
dozens. ’Tis a game into which all Europe has entered in high good
humour, the grand _farçeur_, Napoleon, even proposing to extend the
Republic’s boundaries, which comprise only thirty-three square miles.
But the Sammarinese had sense enough to see that a greater realm would
be treated more seriously. Mount Titan, as the seat not of a toy capital
but of something answering less humorously to its name, would cease to
be a joke, whereas a State less than one-fourth of the Isle of Wight
might remain for Europe a blessed land of diversion from the eternal
earnestness of the sword, might even save Europe’s self-respect as a
region of civilisation, regardful of treaties and ancient rights. So
serious in fact did the Sammarinese consider the danger of being taken
seriously, that Antonio Onofri who advised against this Napoleonic
inflation stands immortalised as Pater Patriæ.
No doubt the inaccessibility of Mount Titan must have been the origin of
San Marino’s existence in those dim days of the Diocletian persecution,
when the Roman Matron, Felicita, whom the stone-cutter Marinus had
converted to Christianity, “made him a present of the mountain.” And the
same inaccessibility which suited it for a Christian colony contributed
later to the success of its traditional policy of balancing between the
Rimini Malatestas and the Dukes of Urbino. But what prevented Austria
from following Garibaldi into San Marino? What but its enjoyment of the
game, or its desperate clinging to that shred of self-respect? To-day
when the cycle of history has brought us round again to the period of
Ezzelino, when the intellectual or religious concepts, which anciently
veiled usurpations, are contemptuously thrown aside, and the iron hand
crushes in mockery of the combined Jurists of Europe, what stands
between San Marino and extinction? Only the environing Italy. And Italy
plays with the tiny Republic as a father plays with a child. San Marino
has two mortars in the fortress of La Rocca—for what is a State without
artillery to fire on solemn occasions?—and these mortars were presented
by Victor Emmanuel III. Italy also receives the more desperate
criminals, who are boarded out in its prisons, as it supplies the police
from its reserve soldiers, and the Judge from its lawyers. Italy has
provided its only distinguished citizens—they are honorary,—its
national hymn was taken from Guido of Arezzo, the inventor of the
musical scale, and when the beautiful if mimetic Palazzo Pubblico for
the Regents and the Council was opened in 1894, it was with a speech of
Carducci.
Yet “Liberty,” I found, was the keynote of San Marino. Liberty was the
motto of its arms, with their three mountains and plumed towers. Liberty
waved in the white and blue flag and was painted on the shields of the
palace corridors. S. Marino, the author of Liberty, was commemorated in
the cathedral façade with its flourish of Sen. P. Q., and Liberty cried
from the scroll his statue flourished. “In tuenda Libertate vigilis”
warned the inscription over the court room; “animus in consulendo Liber”
counselled the medallion near the tribune, and in choice Latin epigraphs
the transient tyrant, Cæsar Borgia, impugner of Liberty, was denounced
and derided. Sublime it was to stand before the Gothic Palace of the
Regents, on this dizzy Piazza della Libertà with its gigantic statue of
Liberty (her hand on her bannered spear), and to behold the sheer abyss
below, and as from an aeroplane the marvellous panorama of sea and
mountain around, Liberty written in every rugged convolution and glacial
peak, and shimmering in every masterless wave. And yet my imagination
refused to play the game; refused to take with becoming reverence the
crowned and gilded pew of the Regents, the historic frescoes and
friezes, the blue and orange of the “Guarda Nobile,” the képis and
bayonets of the militia, the red facings of the police. All this parade
of “Libertas” was in inverse proportion to the substance, or even to the
power of securing it. The Republic appeared like a banknote without gold
behind it, and an Italian banknote at that; never so essentially Italian
as in the lapidary literature asserting its separateness. This grand
Palace, this costly Cathedral, both built only within the last few years
simultaneously with the motor road that has destroyed the last semblance
of isolation, seemed like that spasm of self-assertiveness which so
often precedes extinction. And I thought that conquering nations might
well mark how easily love can melt what hate would only harden. Imagine
if Italy had brought her mortars against San Marino instead of
presenting them to it, or if she had made a road for her mortars instead
of for her motors!
But as an antique curio San Marino is delightful. I love to muse on the
pomp of its Regents who are elected—like the Doges of Venice—by a
mixture of choice and chance, and go in state to celebrate mass, clothed
in satin breeches and velvet mantle, in doublet and sword and ermined
cap, accompanied by the Noble Guard and the high officers of State, and
then from the Cathedral, still to the clashing of church bells and the
strains of military music, to their semestral thrones in the Palazzo
Pubblico; there to hear a speech from the Government Orator—whose fee
is four shillings—and to take the Latin oath not to tamper with the
Libertas of the Constitution, and to receive the State seals and keys
and the insignia of Grand Masters of the Order of San Marino, perhaps
even the first instalment of the royal budget of a pound a month.
No autocrats are these Regents, despite their regal salary. They are
mere constitutional monarchs, official headpieces to the Arringo or
sovereign Council in which the real power resides. But though
Republican, San Marino is not Democratic, for the Arringo fills up its
vacancies by option. Liberty is not flouted however, for may not every
head of a family—after the half-yearly elections—give the Arringo a
piece of his mind? Time was when the citizen could stroll into its
sittings and tender it the benefit of his advice, but this form of
Liberty seems to have been found too excessive and cumbersome even for
the land of Libertas.
Happy are the nations that have no history, and San Marino seems to have
escaped almost without an anecdote. In 1461 Pope Pius II invited it to
make war with the Magnificent Monster, Sigismondo Malatesta of Rimini,
and rewarded its aid with four castles. Cæsar Borgia came and went in
1503, a nocturnal attack by Fabiano del Monte was repulsed in 1543, and
after that nothing appears to have happened till 1739, when the Cardinal
Legate, Giulio Alberoni, occupied the Republic. But the Republic having
appealed to the Pope was left free again, Clement XII thus becoming a
national hero with his bust in the Palazzo. But national heroes of its
own it has none. It has adopted the cult of Garibaldi, though he
preaches Italian Unity, and made honorary citizens of Canova, Rossini
and Verdi, and it has almost appropriated the famous numismatist,
Bartolommeo Borghesi, who did at least live here, if he omitted to be
born here, and who dominates one of the wonderful mountain-terraces,
holding a book and gazing carefully at the only point where there is no
view. But as to the “Viri Clarissimi et Illustres Castri Sancti Marini”
blazoned on the Palazzo staircase, between shields of “Libertas,” I fear
their celebrity had not reached me. Doctors, artists, counts,
dignitaries of the Church—I was impartially ignorant of them all.
What is to account for this paucity of personalities? Had a great saint
or a great poet arisen here, we should have explained it glibly by the
pious isolation among the eternal mountains, looking down upon the
eternal sea, under the everlasting stars. Had a new Acropolis or a new
Parthenon risen on this hill of the Titan, we should not have lacked
proofs of the inevitability of the new Athens. But nothing has arisen.
Giambittisti Belluzzi, the military architect of its walls and of the
Imperial Castle at Pesaro, is San Marino’s highest name in art, while in
literature its chroniclers point to Canon Ignazio Belzoppi, “letterato
di molta fama,” born in 1762, author of the heroi-comic poem, “Il
Bertuccino” (The Little Monkey)—_unpublished_!
For life to be perfect then, small circles are not enough, _pace_ my
friend Boëthius. They must tingle with life, perhaps even with death.
Can it be that the _advocatus diaboli_ was right, and that the snug
security of a diplomatic mountain-fastness has bred mediocrity? I tell
him angrily that the place is a Paradise and he answers calmly that it
is only a Parish. Can it be that the only Paradise possible is a Fools’
Paradise?
But a serpent has entered Eden, crawling probably by the motor-car road.
He has insinuated doubt of holy authority and the Sammarinese begin to
eat of the Tree of Knowledge. _Il Titano_ is the organ of the
Socialists—a Titan in revolt—and the _Somarino_ serves the
Clericals—with the accent on the Santo. “Preti!!!” is the ejaculatory
title of an article in the number of _Il Titano_ that came into my hands
(April 24, 1910). “We might say impostors, falsifiers, _canaille_,” it
begins pleasantly, “but we say instead ‘Priests,’ which is a substantive
that comprises all the others.”
And thus across its precipices San Marino joins hands with “Young
Italy,” whose programme according to the organ of that name embraces the
exiling of the Vatican beyond the frontiers of Italy, the sweeping away
of the bankrupt remains of Christianity, and the abandonment of
Imperialism and the African adventure. I will engage there are even
Futurists in San Marino.