San Marino: An Italian Turducken*

(*Tur-duk-in:  For those not familiar with the Food Channel, a Turducken is a chicken placed inside of a duck which is stuffed inside of a turkey, sewn closed and then the whole thing is roasted in the oven. The only relationship to my blog post is that neither the duck or the chicken have any easy access to the outside world, and nor does San Marino.)
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Apparently, one of the casualties of the formation of the EU was the fun of getting your passport stamped. With the open borders, there is little need to track people traveling from one member country to another, so not only are passports not stamped, but seldom requested.

Passport stamps used to be one of the few free souvenirs you could bring home without buying additional luggage. Now, although you can sometimes request a stamp, most of the time it just isn't done. There are a few exceptions, though....

Il Vaticano
Most people know that the Vatican is a City State within the city of Rome, and as such have their own version of the Euro and they will stamp your passport at a kiosk if you ask.

San Marino
What a lot of people don't know (me included until I came across it in something I was reading) is that there is another country entirely within the country of Italy. It is called the Most Serene Republic of San Marino (Repubblica di San Marino), and is a 24 square-mile "enclave surrounded by Italy (Wiki)", and has a population of about 30,000.

 

San Marino is the oldest surviving sovereign state and constitutional republic in the world, as the continuation of the monastic community founded on 3 September 301, by stonecutter Marinus of Arbe.

San Marino is considered to have a highly stable economy, with one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe, no national debt and a budget surplus.... Wiki

This tiny country is divided into nine "castelli" (meaning castles) or municipalities; eight minor munincipalities; and 43 hamlets or "curazie". It has its own local euro.

AND they stamp passports,although there is a small charge, so actually I guess they "sell" passport stamps. I am hope we might be able to make a small detour to San Marino to get our passports stamped, and visit another country, but there is no airport, no train station, no actual bus station. The best way to get there is to go to Rimini and catch the bus there, spend the day, and then go back to Rimini. Or, there is a hostel in the main town, so that would be another option. Since it is 3 hours from Padova, and three hours from Perugia, there is no easy way to get there, and it may be a bit of a hastle to just get a passport stamp, but who knows how long they will even be available, and if the time allows, it could be a fun adventure, as long as the dramamine holds out.