Postage Stamp Republic

The most serene Republic of San Marino, an awesome, almost impregnable mountain of rock in northern Italy, is not only the oldest and smallest democracy in the world but, in the strictest sense of the word, is the only one. A short time ago, it had a Communist government and, as everybody surely knows by now, it had a civil war and has thrown the rascals out. The reaction to this in the American papers was one of almost eleutheromaniac joy. The Christian Science Monitor called it "a victory"; The New York Times called it "an unprecedented triumph"; and what with all the hullabaloo, you'd think the Sammarinesi had finally fought their way out of slavery -- out of the salt mines, perhaps. Well, I was in San Marino when the Communists were there, and damned if I could see what the shouting was about. San Marino wasn't a police state by any means. The people I saw were happy and unafraid and seemed to be running their own affairs, peacefully and rather well. I was told, in San Marino, that the Communists there are not really Communists but something else, and the people who told me were apparently right. The "Communosts," who had been running the place a dozen years, still hadn't nationalized the industries (continued on page 38)Postage Stamp(continued from page 29) or collectivized the farms -- "It would hurt production," they said. Their ties, if any, with the International Communist Conspiracy, or even with the U.S.S.R., were pretty tenuous: they had a consul general in New York City but nobody at all in Moscow, and I learned that the U.S.S.R. abstained from voting when, in 1953, San Marino was approved for the International Court of Justice. There was an opposition party in San Marino when I was there, the Christian Democrats, who flourished. Nobody in the Christian Democrats had been tortured, tried, shot or sent to a labor camp, although a lawyer of theirs was stopped by the police in 1949 and asked to open his briefcase; he told them to mind their own business, and they did. After much digging and prying, I was able to learn from the Christian Democrats a few cases of what they would call Communist tyranny. At times, the Christian Democratic newspaper had been censored, once after saying the government was led by "traitors and infidels who have prostituted our country to evil and corruption and have caused the bones of our patron saint to tremble in his grave." An Italian priest who said the same men were murderers and assassins was told to go home. Signor Guidobaldi Gozi and two friends were put in jail after a Fascist demonstration; Signor Giuseppe Righi and a friend were put in jail after slandering the foreign minister; all of them were let out shortly after. Signor Cesare Bonelli, a tourist, was put in jail, and everybody was red as a beet. That is all. It's true, of course, that nobody is wholly free when any of this can happen, but even the most zealous of the Christian Democrats I saw agreed that things were considerably worse in the Russian satellite countries.

All in all, the Most Serene Republic of San Marino seemed to be just that -- most serene. The civil war that finally threw the Communists out, also seemed from the newspapers to be serene enough. A fist fight in the piazza was reliably reported, and somebody took a pot-shot at Giulio Massima. (He missed.) One of the papers reported that "a lot of trigger-happy guys [are] running around out there. Thank God most of them don't know where the triggers are." Apparently, the only sustained action of the war was seen by the mimeograph machines: the Communists were in the government palace with one of them, and the Christian Democrats were holed up in an iron foundry, four miles away, with another, and also with a few bottles of chianti, some candles, a portable radio to get the war news on, and a total of eight rifles and submachine guns with a sign on them, "Don't touch." No one did. The war was over in eight days, when the Communist mimeograph machine announced, "Overwhelmed ... the people's government of San Marino ceases all vain resistance and offers this last service for the supreme good of the nation." The Communists are out of office now, and the Christian Democrats are in. "A victory," said the Christian Science Monitor. "An unprecedented triumph," said The New York Times. "San Marino ... succeeds in setting itself free."

"Così, così," is what I bet they said in San Marino.

• • •

Shortly before all this, I drove to San Marino on the smooth, wide asphalt road running straight as an arrow from the Adriatic coast. The road is one of the best in Italy. After it crosses the Sammarinese frontier -- where there was, incidentally, no customs or any other sign of an Iron Curtain -- it starts to climb uphill in zigzags, crossing again and again the road it superseded. By car, it was a zesty 15-minute ride to the top of the mountain, where the capital city clings. San Marino, the city, was built as a fort, with a city wall and narrow cobbled streets of gray and ponderous stones that are terribly slippery in the rain.

Everywhere I went, I could see and hear reminders of San Marino's independence. One of these is the cubic, crenelated palace of the government, whose bells -- what high fidelity fans might call a woofer and a tweeter -- woof and tweet in an utterly incomprehensible way every quarter hour, and another is the fort on every high point of the city, defending it through the ages. Still another is the city itself; it seems to be hovering over the earth as Laputa, the flying island of Gulliver's Travels, had been, apparently free from any terrestrial stays. In San Marino -- 38 square miles, 14 thousand people -- I always knew I was in an independent country. The Sammarinesi were tickled pink to talk about it, to write about it, apparently even to think about it, and I gathered they were tickled most of all to come across some benighted soul who never even heard of the place, and to buttonhole him at length. As soon as I got there, I was buttonholed by a concierge and was taken willy-nilly to see one, another, and still another movie about San Marino. The movies were of a piece. They were full of those reminders of San Marino's independence, shown with pride -- the palace, the forts, the inaugural parades, the country's flag. One of them ended showing San Marino's coat of arms on one of San Marino's mailboxes, into which an endless line of tourists (to San Marino) put letters, all of them stickered with San Marino's stamps. At this point, martial music played, crescendo.

Here and there in the movies, I was shown the faces of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Napoleon, Garibaldi, and a very saint-like and bearded stonecutter, and I wondered, naturally, what such an unlikely crowd had to do with the Most Serene Republic of San Marino. The answer, I learned later, was not much. Lincoln wrote a letter to the republic on May 7, 1861, thanking it for an honorary citizenship and saying that San Marino "has by its experience demonstrated the truth, so full of encouragement to the friends of Humanity, that Government founded on Republican principles is capable of being so administered as to be secure and enduring." F.D.R. wrote a letter on January 17, 1945, saying that truer words than Lincoln's were never spoken. Napoleon discovered San Marino on a map in 1796, and is said to have said, "Ma foi! Let us preserve it as the model of a republic"; he did. Garibaldi, at least, was in San Marino; the armies of Austria, Spain, France and Naples chased him there in 1849, but he gave them the slip and went to America. This is hardly the stuff of which history is made in any more extensive country, but in San Marino, I gathered, these are the high points of an otherwise unspectacular millenium.

The saintly stonecutter, I learned, was none other than San Marino himself, who more or less founded the country in the 4th Century and is its patron saint. A devout Christian, he fled from the lion arenas to the mountain that today is San Marino, and he lived in a cave there; soon he was joined by other Christians; and the owner of the mountain, Felicita, who at first regarded him as simply a trespasser, at length was converted, joined the colony and maybe even married him, and now is a saint herself. (So is Leo, Marino's best friend.) Marino, when he died, was buried on the mountain, but when he became a saint he was stolen by King Astolphus, who took him to Pavia, Italy, where he was stolen by Pepin the Short, who put him back; as of going-to-press he was located, or so the Sammarinesi believe, in the altar of the big white basilica high above the city. His skull is shown to everyone on September 4th. Marino, it is said, has kept an active interest in the affairs of the republic, more than once getting it out of jams -- notably by laying a fog in 1542, of which more in a few minutes. A sentence of 20 days is prescribed for saying "San Marino" in vain.

The Marino legend says, furthermore, that he set up San Marino as a democracy, and it was for certain a democracy of the Athenian sort by the 1200s, almost (continued on page 46)Postage Stamp(continued from page 38) everyone sitting in the legislature. (Women and children were out, as they were in Athens.) This body, the Arringo, still is meeting twice a year, and it's why San Marino can be called the only real democracy on earth. To be sure, nothing much happens in the Arringo these days; 20 or 30 men show up, petitioning it, and absentees are supposed to be fined one six-hundredth of an American cent, but never are. It's all over in 30 minutes. Actually, most of San Marino's laws are made by the Great and General Council, 60 men. The Great and General Council, in turn, elects two people in it as captains regent, kind of bicameral chiefs of state, like the Roman consuls. (Until 1945, the captains regent were chosen by lot -- a child, usually blind, pulled their names from an urn -- but the Communists decided this mode of selection was altogether too chancy.) The two men govern San Marino jointly for half a year, and can't be re-elected.

• • •

While I was in San Marino, two captains regent, Signori Augusto Maiani and Primo Bugli, a Communist and a left-wing Socialist, respectively, were inaugurated, and the inaugural was seen by something more than a hundred tourists, including me. The tourists were Italians and Germans, mostly; they began appearing in San Marino in force on the night before, and the shops kept open, selling them postage stamps and vases. Black cars from Rome with diplomatic license plates were all about, and excitement was in the air. Besides me, there was one other American there, a good-looking girl in a red cashmere sweater who said she was employed at our consulate in Florence, Italy, and that her name was Patricia. Later, as Patricia and I had a beer together at the Ristorante Garibaldi, she added she was there in a more-or-less official capacity, having been asked at the consulate to represent the United States at the inaugural there, the consul being busy in Genoa. She was in fact the Acting American Minister to San Marino -- a sort of pro tempore Clare Booth Luce. Patricia wasn't altogether sure of what was expected of her, but, she said, a concierge had promised to take her in tow, getting her to the right places at the right times. Some Sammarinesi at the Ristorante Garibaldi bought us a round of beer, and a Belgian standing at the bar taught Patricia to curtsy -- something, she said, she would doubtless be called upon to execute on the morrow.

The next day was crisp and a little overcast. After breakfast, I strolled to the cobbled piazza in front of the palace, where, I had understood, the day's activities would be centered, and where a small, determined knot of tourists was already standing about, toying with their exposure meters and waiting for something to happen. Nothing did until 9:45, when we heard the sound of drums, horns and glockenspiels far away. The music grew nearer, and presently a band came into the piazza, the men trying not to look at their friends in the windows above and, rather desperately, to keep in step. Then there came a column-by-two of riflemen; they were dressed in blue with chevrons of red, and they were of all shapes and ages, as if the Boy Scouts had run afoul somehow of a World War I contingent. And lastly there came a column of swordsmen, in flashy orange. A bouquet of white and powder-blue feathers was flouncing on each of their heads, apparently growing directly out of it, and the tourists hurried over to get a picture. At 10 o'clock sharp, the bells, in their own mysterious fashion, gave a woof, woof, woof, woof and no tweets; the band struck up the national anthem, the swordsmen drew their swords, and a man in an utterly indescribable uniform raised the flag of San Marino, white and powder blue. Then he, the band, the riflemen and the swordsmen went down the hill, and everything was quiet for the next hour. The tourists were getting impatient, and were taking pictures of each other and writing postal cards

The band marched up again at 11 o'clock. (It spent the greater part of the day going up and down, I observed.) This time, a column-by-two of dignitaries was coming after it, some of them in striped pants and cutaways, and one of them in all this and a W-shaped beard, too. The captains regent were there, in black robes and floppy black hats trimmed with ermine, and immense medals on ribbons of white and powder blue, and the captains-regent-to-be were right after them. And right after them was Patricia, looking lovely. She wore a blue suit, and she carried a blue pocketbook by the strap, and as she walked she chatted with the Belgian of the night before, who had changed into a fine green uniform with a heap of feathers on top, like a hoopoe bird. There were others like him, and there were some other women, too, including the acting minister from Haiti.

The dignitaries went across the piazza and into the palace, where, I learned, they would be presented to the captains regent, and I imagined that Patricia would be called upon now to curtsy. (She was, but didn't, she told me later, having remembered at the last moment that Americans are only supposed to bow.) Outside, meanwhile, the crush of tourists was so bad that the column of orange swordsmen couldn't turn around; it marched into the palace, reassembled, and marched out again, and the tourists took pictures of it coming and going. Presently, the dignitaries emerged, a terribly bald one holding Patricia by the arm and absolutely beaming; so was the sun, and the band was playing loudly, and everything was like a football game on a golden day at halftime.

Shortly afterward, the captains regent took the oath of office. Someone -- a Communist, I was told -- gave a speech in Italian, and I picked up the words "libertas," "Garibaldi," and "Abraham Lincoln"; a man behind him nodded vigorously, and there was a burst of applause when he finished. Then a flourish, and the old captains regent took the medals on the white-and-powder-blue ribbons off, to lower them slowly on the new. The music hit a peak; the captains-regent-to-be became the captains regent. "Ecco! Ecco!" cried a little girl beside me. I felt warm and patriotic. And then, the crowd poured across the sun-drenched piazza; the band marched downhill, uphill, and downhill again, and up again in the afternoon for a concert; the bells gave a woof and two tweets; and Patricia went off in a limousine, the man with the bald head waving and waving goodbye.

The International Communist Conspiracy seemed far, far away -- about 500 years in the future.

• • •

A few days later, when they were comfortably settled in office, I paid a call on the captains regent and found them getting along fine together. They reminded me, in fact, of Tweedledum and Tweedledee -- they not only looked alike, with swarthy round faces and oiled hair, but they were dressed almost identically, in gray suits, gray socks and those awful pearl-gray ties that diplomats wear. Whenever they spoke, it was always in bits and snatches, each of them interrupting the other, but the pieces, strung together by my interpreter, always seemed to make a coherent sentence. Signor Maiani, the Communist, said that prior to his election he worked on a farm, in a mine, and eventually at a tourist shop; Signor Bugli, the leftwing Socialist, said he sold postage stamps. The two signori, although, they continued, they lived five miles apart and hadn't met before their inauguration, were already calling each other by their last names, having dropped the "Signor." Some of the things to be done for San Marino in the coming months, they said, still interrupting each other, were social security and public housing. (The Communists had already built many houses, as well as (continued on page 68)Postage Stamp(continued from page 46) established old-age pensions, full employment, and civil rights for women, who couldn't own any property till then, and still can't vote.) Neither of these seemed especially crucial, so Signor Bugli and I decided to talk about postage stamps, which he once sold. Signor Bugli, with some assistance from Signor Maiani, said that San Marino used at first the Kingdom of Sardinia's stamps and, after the unification, Italy's; the Sardinian ones are worth from 24 to 400 dollars now when canceled by the Sammarinese post office, he said. The first Sammarinese stamps were issued in 1877, and philatelists, whose pricing policies I wouldn't even pretend to understand, were paying only 36 cents for some of them, but only 16 cents if they weren't sticky. On the other hand, another of those stamps is worth as much as $9.68 sticky, $4.03 unsticky, and $6.45 canceled. An unscrupulous dealer who buys a gross of them and puts stickum on apparently makes a profit of $813.60, minus the cost of the stickum. Also, Signor Bugli told me, San Marino used to make its own money but doesn't any more.

A while later, positively fascinated by all this, I did some private research into the postage stamp matter, and I learned that San Marino made do with the 1877 stamps for half-a-dozen years, overprinting them Centesimi 5 and Centesimi 10 in 1892, and changing the colors a bit later. Now, though, it is thinking them up at 20 or 25 a year and has issued no fewer than 754 kinds, including 117 air mail ones, although there isn't an airport in the whole country. The stamps commemorate such various things as Columbus' birth and the opening of the Sammarinese railway, and depict such persons as San Marino, Garibali, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin and the Discus Thrower, and, needless to say, are bought up eagerly by philatelists in every land, adding $160,000 a year to the Sammarinese treasury. I also learned that the ink was hardly dry on the 1892 stamps -- the ones with the overprint Centesimi 5 -- when the printers found that a considerable profit could be had by printing them all wrong. To the inexpressible delight of philatelists everywhere, they began to print Centesimi 5 rightside up, upside down, singly, doubly, doubly upside down, and doubly rightside up and upside down, and had even printed a set of Gentisimi 5s when somebody told them to lay off. (Today, the Gentisimi 5s are worth $136 sticky and $72 dry, and if the "G" is especially fat, they're worth $160 sticky, $80 dry. How people figure this out, I'll never know.) According to San Marino, someone is now assigned to the print shop to stop any similar malpractices, but I noted that since the war it has printed 64 kinds of stamps that are perforated wrong, 10 that are centered wrong, and one that even is colored wrong, and in 1947 a stamp that was supposed to be overprinted Giornata Filatelica wound up as Giornata Filatelica.$ To make matters worse, a rascal in Italy has bought up Sammarinese stamps and messed them up on his own, overprinting 3 Novembre 1918 upside down on some of them, for instance, and making a killing.

San Marino's stamps are not its only source of revenue, I learned. There are taxes; and Italy gives it a rake-off on its import duties, as it ought to. Nevertheless, I learned, the Communists were going further and further into the hole after the war, as their annual budget neared a million dollars. Of course, the first thing they thought of doing was printing more postage stamps, including, in 1947, a series in honor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which they figured would be a wowser in the United States. (American philatelists who missed out in 1947 will be pleased to learn that Roosevelt can still be gotten for a penny and a half, sticky or dry, canceled or not. This is the retail price for the one-lira Roosevelt, on which is quoted his historic letter to San Marino. The President himself is shown in a very patriotic attitude on the five-lira stamp, a glorious thing in purple, brown, red, white and blue. This Roosevelt is worth 2 cents canceled, 2 cents uncanceled, $2.40 if his bottom isn't perforated, $1.20 if his side isn't perforated, a nickel if he's overprinted, and heaven knows what if he's overprinted twice. He also comes in air mail.) Posthumously, F.D.R. wasn't enough to balance San Marino's budget, though, and Italy, meanwhile, had aggravated things by not giving it the import duties, so as to start an economic crisis there, getting rid of the Communists. For a while, the country didn't know where to turn. At this critical juncture, there appeared in San Marino a terribly mysterious person, Mr. Maximo Maxim, who rented a bungalow, got himself a mistress, wore yellow velvet gloves, and talked all day on the long-distance phone, thereby giving rise to rumors not only in San Marino but in such remote quarters as Time and Life that he was a Communist spy, perhaps the Communist boss of Italy. Mr. Maxim, who said all along, in vain, that he was just a businessman, offered to San Marino 400 thousand dollars a year to let him build a casino there. The Communists agreed -- forgetting that the same offer had been made a hundred years before, and that the captains regent had refused it, exclaiming, "Citizens! It is not by the maintenance of material prosperity that the good name of free states is preserved. It is by means of the great virtues of proud and honest republicans, who know how to repulse riches, even in poverty."

Mr. Maxim's casino -- a couple of baccarat tables and five roulette ones -- opened in 1949, and soon was making money hand over fist. At this point, re-enter Italy, still trying to get rid of the Communists. Italy said it wouldn't stand idly by while Italians were being "bled"; it put up a roadblock at San Marino's frontier, told the gamblers to get a passport, a visa and a carnet de passages, and even then, it held them a few more hours looking for marijuana in their hat bands. After months of such harassment, San Marino gave up. The casino was closed; Mr. Maxim, arrested in Italy, was sent to Israel; and Italians had to travel considerably farther, to San Remo, to bleed. San Marino was 800 thousand dollars in the red, unable to pay its employees for three months. Since then, it has thought of making money as a kind of Reno, Nevada, a kind of Panama (registering ships), and even a kind of Parke-Bernet Gallery, selling such titles as The Count of Montelupe for 24 thousand dollars and The Duke of Peschiera for 37 thousand, but nothing has worked out right. The country still wasn't solvent when I was there. The casino was boarded up, and great hiatuses already were to be seen in the plasterwork.

• • •

Of all the places I have written about for Playboy, I liked San Marino best. Andorra, the only other democracy, has kept its freedom in a rather sneaky way, I think, by truckling equally to France and Spain; San Marino has kept free by fighting for it. Time and again, it has been attacked by such people as the Borgias, the Wrongheads, the Bishops of Montefeltro, and the Pope. The Pope invaded it in 1542 (but the army got lost in a fog, produced, it is said, by San Marino himself), and the gypsies invaded it in 1559; the Masons wanted it in 1790, apparently. Most of these wars were against the Roman Catholic Church, the most noted of them being in 1739, when Cardinal Alberoni conquered San Marino and held it 105 days.

San Marino has been invaded only once since then -- in 1944, when it was used as a battlefield by the Germans and the British. A bit earlier, the British had bombed it, too, believing, in error, that ammunition was being stored there; 62 people were killed, and a million dollars worth of damage was done, greater than all the other invasions together. San Marino has been asking for compensation ever since. So far, the British are willing to pay only 72 thousand dollars (concluded on page 77)Postage Stamp(continued from page 68) -- reckoned, I was told, at 40 dollars for each fatality, four cents for bomb disposal, and other damages -- and San Marino refuses to take so little. Its notes to the Foreign Office are getting firmer and firmer, now being written in plain English instead of Latin, as before. There's no telling how it will end, really, but I was assured in San Marino that a resort to force is not likely.

• • •

When I was there, the Christian Democrats were talking it up that to get a million dollars from England, the Christian Democrats must do it. This was one of their selling points in the last election -- indeed, it was almost the only one. The next election, and the next chance for a Communist comeback, is this spring, and now the Christian Democrats are talking up the women's right to vote, their idea being that women are better Christians than men and likelier to vote for Christian Democrats. And even the Communists are being given pause by signs like "The women have the right to elect and be elected -- Article 137, Russian Constitution" in all the piazzas. The Committee for the Emancipation of the Sammarinese Lady is hard at work, and it may be the determining factor this year.

I wonder how it'll turn out, this election. I think it'll be close. In San Marino, an election is just about as up-for-grabs as a corporation proxy fight, what with the Communists hurrying about the docks of Genoa and the coal mines of Belgium to round up Sammarinesi of voting age, and the Christian Democrats going as far afield as Hoboken, New Jersey, for theirs. There aren't any residency requirements in San Marino, and these bring-'em-back-alive tactics are legal, although decried by each of the parties when practiced by the other. (The last time, more than a thousand dockers, coal miners and factory hands poured into San Marino by bus, voted Communist, got free beer and baloney sandwiches at party headquarters, and tumbled out again the same day. The Christian Democrats' Sammarinesi came by Pan American World Airways from New York, and rumoredly the State Department footed the bill.) Something like this is sure to happen this spring. And when it's over and done with, the newspapers, in sorrow or in joy, will be giving San Marino a "Communist" or a "Christian Democratic" stamp -- but the stamp is one of the un-sticky ones, and they're worth about a dime a dozen. "Communist" or "Democratic," I daresay it won't make a big difference in the Most Serene Republic of San Marino. It's the rest of the world I'm worried about.