Starting today, INSIDER is a bilingual publication. Every article we publish is available in full in both Italian and English. The Republic has a community that lives beyond its borders, and that community still wants to know what’s happening back home.
Our readership statistics confirm something we had long suspected: a significant share of our readers aren’t reading us from San Marino at all.
They are Sammarinese who emigrated, along with their children and grandchildren — people who hold a Titano passport but have built their lives elsewhere. Many have been away for decades. Some struggle with Italian, and in certain cases no longer speak it at all — they heard it from their grandparents, but their everyday language became something else entirely.
Yet the bond has endured.
They write to us, they follow us, they comment on the country’s affairs with a passion that sometimes surpasses that of people living just two hundred metres from the Palazzo Pubblico. It’s a strange and moving relationship: they follow a country they know through family stories and a screen.
It seemed absurd to us that language should be the last remaining barrier.
A Sammarinese citizen living in the United States or Argentina has just as much right to understand what is being voted on in the Grand and General Council (Consiglio Grande e Generale) as someone reading it from a bar in Borgo Maggiore. And there’s a second reason, less sentimental: San Marino is entering a phase in which its affairs are drawing attention from beyond its borders too — institutions, businesses, observers. Anyone who wants to understand this country should be able to do so without going through a translator.
As of today, they can.
