Monte Titano is a limestone ridge of 739 metres over the Romagna plain, with a tower on each of its three summits and the Republic of San Marino on its back. The rock does not belong here. The hills all around are clay. This ridge is a piece of ancient seabed that broke loose as the Apennines rose some twenty million years ago and slid east until it stopped, and the stone still gives up shark teeth and whale bone. The three towers on it are the country's emblem, drawn on the flag and the coat of arms. Guaita is the oldest, begun in the eleventh century and rebuilt during the wars with the Malatesta lords of Rimini. It served as the republic's prison well into modern times, and the cells are empty now. Cesta stands on the highest of the three peaks, on the footings of an older fort, and holds more than 1,500 medieval weapons. Montale has never opened its door.
The walk between them takes you along the old guards' patrol route, the Passo delle Streghe, a stone ledge along the bare crest with the cliff falling away on either side and the wind shoving at you. Where the wall steps down, Guaita stands ahead on its rock pinnacle with the plain far below on both sides. Paragliders work the air off the ridge and pass level with the battlements, close enough to make out the harness, so you look sideways at them rather than up. On the coat of arms each tower wears a silver ostrich plume — they are weathervanes — and the three green hills beneath them are the summits under your feet. One date sits oddly among all this. On 26 June 1944 the Royal Air Force dropped 263 bombs on a republic that had declared its neutrality and was fighting nobody, killing sixty-three people. The intelligence behind the raid was false, and Churchill later admitted it. On cold, still mornings the plain below drowns in fog while the ridge stays in sunlight, and the three towers stand on an island of limestone above a white sea.