I couldn't really risk catching a later train from Rimini so I had to leave as soon as I arrived. The whole micro-state thing was still in my mind as I asked for a single to Andorra....
I arrived back in Ancona, where the whole trip had started, with no other memory of Rimini than a triumphal Roman Arch, and a bus-stop which proudly announced Autolinea Internazionale Rimini-San Marino.
I also tried to melt into the background as I executed a passegiata around Ancona at about 10 o'clock that evening. Any Italian ancestry of mine didn't help in the slightest, with my discount store jeans, Harry Potter spectacles, and Radovan Karazdic haircut. Ancona seemed pleasant, if decidedly unspectacular, but the Italians certainly seem to know how to carry themselves, and you have to concede that they are a rather good-looking lot. The last time I was in Italy, I travelled down to Sicily and found it all a little intimidating, but here in Central Italy, it seems friendlier somehow. There's a pleasant little square with a reconstructed statue of a quandom pope, the usual statue to Cavour, and a decrepit looking pentagonal building in the harbour which might once have looked impressive.
Even though this is something of a transit town, and I'm sitting here waiting for my ferry to Split, I feel myself warming to the Italian way of things, I feel that I am definitely in a land with its own way of seeing things, less dominated by prevalent (i.e. American) homogeneity, than the English are.
And of course , they are much less Italian in every way now that they use the Euro. That's just my little joke.