San Marino

San Marino, officially the Republic of San Marino, is a landlocked microstate in Southern Europe entirely surrounded by Italy, located on the northeastern slopes of the Apennine Mountains, the fifth-smallest country in the world at just over 61 square kilometers with a population of 34,042 as of 2025, and the City of San Marino, atop Monte Titano, as its capital, while Dogana is its largest settlement. San Marino claims to have been founded in AD 301 by Saint Marinus, a stonemason from the Roman island of Rab who fled persecution under Emperor Diocletian to build a monastic community on Monte Titano, making it, by its own claim, the oldest extant sovereign state and the oldest constitutional republic. Its constitutional structure is rare: the democratically elected Grand and General Council selects two Captains Regent as heads of state every six months, chosen from opposing political parties to serve concurrently with equal powers, a structure otherwise followed only, with modifications, by Switzerland's Federal Council. San Marino belongs to the Council of Europe and uses the euro without being part of the European Union; its economy rests on finance, industry, services, retail and tourism, ranking among the wealthiest countries in the world by GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, and it was the first existing state to abolish the death penalty, in 1865, though it had not been used since the 1400s.