San Marino
No kitchen of its own — this is Romagna's table, piadina and pasta on a fortress hilltop.
Like the Vatican, San Marino borrows its cuisine wholesale — here from the surrounding Emilia-Romagna and the Rimini coast just below the mountain. So you eat gloriously Romagnol: piadina, the thin unleavened flatbread folded warm around soft cheese and cured ham; plates of handmade pasta; nidi di rondine, 'swallow's nests' of rolled pasta baked with ham and béchamel until bubbling. Trattorias cluster in the walled old town and Borgo Maggiore, many with terraces that fall away across Romagna to the Adriatic.
What is properly Sammarinese is the sweet: Torta Tre Monti, thin wafer layers filled with hazelnut cream and cloaked in chocolate, shaped as a nod to the three towers on Monte Titano — the national dessert and the classic edible souvenir. The tiny republic even makes its own Sangiovese-based reds, a million bottles a year, sold mostly within its own borders. Eat like you're in Romagna, because you essentially are.
- Piadina (Romagnol flatbread)
- Nidi di rondine (baked rolled pasta)
- Pasta e ceci (chickpea-and-pasta soup)
- Coniglio in porchetta (herb-roast rabbit)
- Torta Tre Monti (wafer-and-chocolate cake)
- Bustrengo (rustic Christmas cake)
- Sangiovese wine
