Holidays in San Marino

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in San Marino

A Date Carved Later Than the Legend: The Founding of San Marino

According to tradition, a Christian stonemason named Marinus fled religious persecution under the Roman emperor Diocletian, took refuge on the slopes of Mount Titano, and there founded the small community that grew into the Republic of San Marino. The traditional date given for this founding, and for the death of Marinus, is September 3 in the year 301, a date still celebrated every year as the country's national holiday. Marinus is said to have left his followers a final instruction that became the republic's founding principle, freeing them, in his words, from both men, meaning from both the Emperor and the Pope.

Historians studying San Marino's own archives have pointed out that the earliest surviving written mention of the community dates only to the year 885, and that the year 301 itself does not appear in the earliest surviving accounts of his life, which were written centuries after the events they describe. The date only became fixed as official fact through a government decree issued in 1941, after which every Sammarinese public document began carrying a short abbreviation meaning from the Foundation of the Republic next to the ordinary calendar year. Independent historians now generally place the origins of San Marino's actual governing institutions in the 13th century, making the state's documented political history roughly 800 years old rather than 1,700, though the older legendary date remains central to national identity.

Counting Years Since Marinus: San Marino's Parallel Calendar

Alongside the ordinary Gregorian calendar, official Sammarinese documents traditionally carry a second, parallel date expressed as a number of years from the Foundation of the Republic, abbreviated in Italian and usually written after the standard year. This convention was formally codified by a government decree in 1941, which declared September 3, 301, the fixed starting point of the era for legal and administrative purposes, regardless of any historical debate over the date's accuracy.

The idea of counting years from a symbolic founding moment rather than from a fixed religious epoch has parallels elsewhere in history, from the Ab Urbe Condita system Roman writers occasionally used to date events from the legendary founding of Rome, to the short lived French Republican calendar introduced after 1789, to the regnal era names still used on official documents in Japan today. In San Marino's case the practice survives mainly as a ceremonial flourish on state papers and commemorative currency rather than as a system ordinary citizens use in daily life, but it remains one of the more distinctive ways a modern European state marks its own sense of continuous political time.

Two Heads, Six Months: The Rhythm of San Marino's Government

San Marino is governed by two Captains Regent who serve jointly as heads of state for a term of exactly six months, a rotation that repeats twice every year without exception. The investiture ceremony always takes place on April 1 and October 1, in the Piazza della Liberta outside the Public Palace, and the practice of electing two co-equal regents rather than a single ruler is explicitly modeled on the paired consuls of the ancient Roman Republic. The earliest surviving written record of two such regents, then still called consuls, dates to a document from December 1243.

Once their six month term ends, the outgoing regents return immediately to the status of ordinary citizens and, under a rule set out in the republic's statutes, cannot be re-elected to the office again for at least three years. This built in expiration date is often cited as one of the reasons San Marino has avoided the concentration of long term political power seen in many larger states, and the twice yearly ceremony, complete with religious rites and a formal changing of authority, remains one of the most closely followed events on the republic's civic calendar.

The Clock Tower of the Public Palace

The building that now serves as San Marino's seat of government, known as the Public Palace, stands on Piazza della Liberta on the site of a much older medieval structure dating to the 1380s. By the late 19th century that older building had fallen into disrepair, and in 1883 the Grand and General Council voted to demolish it entirely and commission a new palace from the Rome born architect Francesco Azzurri. Construction ran from 1884 to 1894, and the finished building, with its stone battlements and a bell and clock tower rising above the main facade, was deliberately designed in a neo Gothic style recalling the civic palaces of medieval Italian city states.

Inside, the palace houses the chambers of the Grand and General Council and the Captains Regent, along with paintings commemorating the republic's founding legend. The clock tower itself, decorated with the same battlements and stonework as the rest of the facade, has become one of the most photographed features of the historic center, which along with Mount Titano was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2008 partly in recognition of the unusual, centuries old system of government the building still houses today.

Every Thirty Minutes: The Changing of the Guard

Each year between spring and early autumn, visitors gathered in front of the Public Palace can watch a small ceremonial unit known as the Guardia di Rocca, dressed in dark green double breasted jackets with red trim and white gaiters, relieve the sentries on duty outside the seat of government. The ceremony runs on a strict schedule, typically repeating every thirty minutes through the afternoon, so that the same small piece of military theater plays out dozens of times across a single summer day.

Though the uniforms and marching drills evoke earlier centuries, the modern Guardia di Rocca traces its formal organization only to the 18th century, even if related fortress guard units are believed to have existed in some form much earlier. Today the unit's ceremonial duties exist alongside its practical role patrolling San Marino's borders, and the precisely timed changing of the guard has become, for many visitors, one of the most reliable ways to plan a visit to the historic center around a specific hour of the day.

Bartolomeo Borghesi and the Chronology of Ancient Rome

Born in 1781 in Savignano near Rimini, the scholar Bartolomeo Borghesi withdrew to San Marino in the early 1820s after political disturbances in the wider region and spent the rest of his life there as a private citizen and, for a time, as a local magistrate. Working largely alone from his adopted small republic, he built a reputation as one of the founders of modern epigraphy and numismatics, the study of ancient inscriptions and coins used to reconstruct history that written narratives often leave incomplete or contradictory.

His most influential work reconstructed the Fasti Consulares, the official list of Roman consuls whose paired names were used in antiquity to identify and date each year, since Rome had no continuous numbered calendar of its own. By carefully comparing inscriptions, coins and fragmentary ancient records, Borghesi helped establish a far more reliable chronology for large stretches of Roman history. From his home in San Marino he corresponded with and personally trained a generation of younger scholars, including the German historian Theodor Mommsen, and his research laid essential groundwork for the later systematic collection of Latin inscriptions still used by historians today. Borghesi died in San Marino in 1860, and a monument to him still stands in the historic center he called home for nearly forty years.

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