San Giovanni sotto le Penne, where San Marino's story begins

Look up from San Giovanni sotto le Penne and Mount Titano’s towers are right above you. That’s where the name comes from, pairing John the Baptist with the Penne, the capital’s forts. It’s a rural village with no grand square, and yet it’s the one in Borgo Maggiore that intrigues me most, because this is where San Marino’s story starts, thousands of years before Marinus the stonemason.

The oldest object in the country

According to Wikipedia, a stone axe-hammer turned up in San Giovanni that radiocarbon dating places between 5000 and 4000 BC, making it the oldest archaeological find in the Republic. The State Museum website doesn’t mention the piece, so whether it’s on display I simply don’t know, but it does confirm the essentials, that the territory has been lived in since the Stone Age and had small Villanovan and Roman settlements. I find it a good corrective to the idea that San Marino begins in AD 301.

Maiano, Roman kilns in the woods

Within the village lies Maiano, which Wikipedia describes as a nature and archaeology area and the southern edge of the buffer zone around the UNESCO site. It was inhabited from Roman times. A rescue dig took place in 1998, and in August 2012 the State Museums uncovered a kiln works covering more than 8,000 square metres, where bricks, tiles, amphorae, jugs and cups were made between the 1st and 3rd centuries. It had everything the trade needed, clay, water and firewood.

What I like best is the detail of the stamps. Some tiles bore the mark of the Seia family, Sextus Seius and Lucius Seius, whose products also turn up in Rimini, and misfired tiles reused in the kiln itself suggest Maiano was one of their production centres. The State Museum, in its room on the Roman period, lists Maiano among the places where bricks and pottery were made. If you want to see that side of it, that’s where to go. My suggestion, if archaeology is your thing, is to do it in that order, the museum room up in the City first and the Maiano woods afterwards, so the landscape has a story attached when you walk through it. The other way round, you’re mostly looking at trees and fields.

A protected area for walking

These days Maiano is mostly about nature. Wikipedia describes it as a protected natural area and wildlife repopulation zone, with hunting banned. It has a spring, the Fonte di Maiano, feeding one of the two old public wash-houses still standing in the country, one of the last original Sammarinese farmhouses, Casa Ugolini, and a handful of fountains and wayside shrines protected by law. The Maiano woods are among the nature walks picked out by the state tourist office.

With no official route map to go on, I’d treat it as an easy, unambitious stroll and pair the area with the better-marked routes I cover in San Marino’s walking trails.

The church, the crossbowmen and the olive grove

The parish church is San Giovanni Battista, at Strada di San Gianno 10, with its feast day on 24 June. Wikipedia lists it as one of the territory’s oldest churches. At the same address live Franciscan missionary sisters who work with residents of Il Colore del Grano, a centre for people with disabilities and one of the social services the government lists in Borgo Maggiore.

The rest of the village is country life with the odd surprise. According to Wikipedia there’s a training ground for San Marino’s crossbowmen, whose public displays you can watch up at the Cava dei Balestrieri. There’s also the refuge of the Sammarinese Animal Protection Association, a riding stable and, since 2014, the country’s first experimental olive grove, run by the Sammarinese Olive Growers’ Cooperative. None of it is set up for visitors, so I wouldn’t give you opening times.

Getting there

From car park P2 in the City, the circular AASS lines 3D and 3S run through Borgo Maggiore and stop at San Giovanni before continuing via Fiorentino, Montegiardino and Faetano. They run on weekdays, summer included, and cost nothing during the free-travel trial that ended on 30 September 2026. By car it’s a short detour from Borgo Maggiore, and I’d slot it into a loop of the southern castelli, with Valdragone or Fiorentino the same morning.