2023 Italy Day 02

By travelerdon on April 12, 2023

Assisi to San Marino, Wed March 22, 2023

We wake up refreshed this morning after almost 2 days of travel to get here (Count a half day of time zone changes). Breakfast in the hotel and we check out. The hotel gives us a key to get to our luggage when we finish touring the city. We walk around streets that were built in medieval times and are amazed how they are still used today! Small cars and trucks zoom up and down these streets as if they owned them (We guess they kind of do!) and you’d be best to pay attention and get out of the way when they zoom by!

We enjoy taking photos and walking the city and we aim ourselves toward the cathedral of San Francisco di Assisi, named after St Francis of Assisi. Any of you religious people will recognize this name. The exterior and interior of the cathedral are both amazing in their own rights! Do not get me started on the excesses of the catholic church for I, like most tourists, only want to see more as the views are amazing! The expenditures in money and labor are a side effect to the grandeur of the sights that abound!

So we shoot to our hearts delight and eventually head back to our hotel. Elee’s knees are yelling at her because she needs replacements (which are scheduled in May through July) and I go downhill to our parking garage and find out how to get our car out! Not an easy feat because they didn’t tell me that I had to pay the parking 150 vertical feet above where I parked it! LOL, my own knees are getting a workout! I finally get it figured out and get the car out! Now just to figure out the narrow, one-way roads and find my way back to the hotel where Elee is patiently waiting, or so I think, LOL. We pack our luggage and head out of town with the expectations of driving to our next destination of San Marino, an actual country embedded within the country of Italy!

The city of San Marino is basically a castle on top of a hill and the roads we have to take to get there are windy and difficult to traverse! At one point, a huge semi tractor trailer actually drives us off the road on a corner which he has no business of being on! I had to drop the right side wheels into a ditch to allow him to pass! WTF??? But that was the only extreme incident and the rest of the ride was just a challenging drive on small hilly and curvy roads!

We finally arrive in the country of San Marino and the signs and GPS warn us of a “Border Crossing Ahead”. It turns out the “Crossing” was simply the crosswalks turning blue, LOL. But if anyone were to do a Google Maps tour of the Country (and City), you would see a criss-cross series of zig zag roads that are amazing to see on a GPS map! We wind our way to the top where we have booked a hotel called the “Rosa Hotel” near the top of the Country Empire! We have to park a hundred yards downhill from the hotel and walk our luggage up. Luckily, this is our very first trip with only Carry-On Luggage so it’s not a real chore!

We check into our hotel and go off into the town to see what we can see. We walk to the town square and off to the Ariel Tramway to only discover we are already at the top! Views of the city and countryside galore assault our senses and camera lenses!

We stop for drinks and snacks at a restaurant that my California friends will find amusing, “In Or Out Burgers”, a play on In And Out. The wine and drinks are good, I have a Very Dry Prosecco and Elee has an Aperol Nisonni which is better than my Prosecco!

We then walk around the area to find a dinner restaurant and find “Betafico” which has some fun local dishes but I am a tad disappointed because I researched a local San Marino dish called “Nidi Di Rondine” which is an interesting Lasagne type dish and we couldn’t find it anywhere! We have experienced this before where we research a local dish that we cannot find! I promise myself to look up the recipe and make it at home!