san marino?

(Bassano del Grappa)


Yes, two posts in a row...really I occasionally do things other than post updates...like take day trips, for example...

So a few days ago some of us decided we wanted to take a day trip to San Marino, which is a separate country from Italy, but is IN Italy and is known for a few beautiful castles and some of the best views of the Adriatic. Brian looked up the train times and it said it was only 2 hours from Venice and cost about 10 Euro--"no reason NOT to go" we're all thinking. So we bought the tickets and I even talked Elizabeth and Kayla into joining us.

Then I start reading Italy travel books to get a better idea of what to see in San Marino and everything I read says "San Marino doesn't have a train station, you have to take the train to Rimini and then a 45 min bus" and I'm thinking that's funny, because we definitely have train tickets to San Marino, not Rimini. So I look up Bassano, the city where we're supposed to change trains, and it's nowhere near San Marino (the country). So I tell the rest of the group and we try to figure out a back up plan (because the REAL San Marino is approx 4 hrs away)...ideas tossed around include taking a bus from the real city of San Marino to Bologna (then we realize how far apart those 2 places are), going to Vicenza by way of Bassano (then we realize there are no trains running between the 2)...

Finally we decide to take a slightly later train (8:45 instead of 7:30 am) and just see what happens when we get there...so on the train this morning, we were slap happy thinking about all the possibilities of what would greet us in Bassano...a trash dump of a city, a one goat town, a surprisingly beautiful place, etc...but after all, it was only an hour and a half to Bassano (we decided to go on to San Marino--the city--only if Bassano was awful), so why not explore.

It ended up being a beautiful, bustling city at the foot of the Dolomites. We walked around for a few hours, had some lunch from a great bread store, did some shopping, and then Kayla, Elizabeth, and I headed back to Venice while the rest of the group stuck around. Even though we didn't get to see the country of San Marino, it was pretty cool to just get on a train and see what happened. Next time, though, I think we'll do our research before we buy train tickets...