jjjrtw: Ancona --> Rimini --> San Marino

Ancona
From Split we took an overnight ferry to Ancona in Italy. It was a long and rocky (like dishes flying of racks rocky) 12 hour ferry ride, but we actually got some decent sleep on a pair of love seats that we claimed. Plus it was really cool sailing into Ancona, which was kind of what I imagined sailing into Italy to look like. Big elegant hill rising right up from the water, with grand old buildings and a church or two at the top. From reading comments online I wasn't expecting much from Ancona, but I found it to be a very nice and charming city. We were only there for a 6 or so hours, but we saw a decent amount of sights. Here are a few:

Calamo Fountain (AKA Fountain of the 13 Pipes)

Fountain of the Four Horses

San Francesco alle Scale church

Lazzaretto

Passetto, WWI monument

Watch out art world: PMS is on the scene

We sat watching the waves takeover this beach for a long time. The waves were crashing all of the way up onto the boardwalk where the closed up bars and changing rooms were. It was early in the morning and was very cold, and for a reason I can't fully explain it has become one of my favorite memories of the trip so far.

Rimini
Despite an intermittent rail worker strike we managed to catch a train from Ancona to the city of Rimini, where we had decided to set up camp for the next few nights (since it is close to Ancona, San Marino and Bologna). Rimini historically has been a fishing town, but became a vacationing destination several decades ago when they built way too many hotels. For a while it was a hot vacation spot for Germans, then for fellow Italians, and most recently for Russians - so currently it's economic outlook depends greatly on the strength of the Russian Ruble, which decides how many Russian tourist will come vacation there for the summer. Overall it felt like a relaxed and friendly coastal city that would be a nice place to raise a family. Fellini grew up there and had a love/hate relationship with it that was the focus of more than one of his movies, but where he decided to be buried. I didn't make it out to see his grave, which I'm really bummed about (but here's a NY Times article on Fellini's Rimini if you are by any chance interested). I will be re-watching Amarcord and I Vitelloni since both are inspired by his childhood experiences in Rimini.

Even though we were there for a couple of day we hardly saw any of Rimini, and didn't take many pictures of what we saw. We did walk around a bit and discovered what is the best/worst roundabout that I have ever seen. It is terrible and fascinating and I am both glad and sad that I don't drive by it everyday.

And the close up:

San Marino
Micro-country, here we come! We took a bus from Rimini into the land of San Marino. Hmm, how to describe this little country...it's the size of a city with less than 35k people (that's a smaller population than the Mission District in SF and about half as geographically large as Richmond CA). What I often wonder about micro-countries is how they managed to stay independent. San Marino's position perched atop a mountain certainly helped, but so did luck...such as Napoleon being pals with a San Marino leader and later Mussolini deciding to respect the country's neutrality. San Marino has remained independent for over 1700 years, when it got it's independence from the Roman Empire and became one of the world's oldest republics. It is a beautiful country and has an alarming amount of weapon stores with guns and crossbows in the window display.