A trove of tiny treasures

If you can identify the five smallest countries in Continental Europe you get a gold star. If you know where they are on the map, you should be on “Jeopardy.” And if you have visited them you don’t get anything else; you have already been rewarded.

The tiniest, Vatican City, is undeniably the most influential.

The next smallest, Monaco, gets very noisy in May.

The third most diminutive, San Marino, was the hilltop hide-out of an escaped slave.

The fourth, Liechtenstein, is widely considered a beautiful Alpine tax haven.

The fifth, Andorra, has the highest average life expectancy in the world at 83.4 years.

Together they take up less space than the Hawaiian island of Oahu, have survived by slipping through history’s cracks and are much fancied by tourists, especially in fall, when the crowds have departed.

Recently I set out to see these miniatures, which took time because they are scattered in nooks and crannies across Europe. Besides postage stamps from each, I brought back a range of impressions.

VATICAN CITY

In ancient times, a low hill on the west side of the Tiber River in Rome overlooked a sports field, or circus, marked by a red granite obelisk from Egypt. In AD 64, the Apostle Peter was crucified and buried in its shadow, incising the place in history.

Today people come here to see Michelangelo’s Pieta, the Raphael rooms, the ancient Laocoon statue or to study some of the crowning architectural achievements of the Italian Renaissance. Some just want to be able to say they’ve visited the smallest country in the world. Others come as religious pilgrims.

I take the No. 64 bus to Vatican City from my apartment on the other side of Rome. It stops under the wall around the corner from a side entrance, hardly as grand an approach as along the Via della Conciliazione, the broad Fascist-era avenue that debouches into St. Peter’s Square, or as soulful a route as one of the small streets, known as borgos, trammeled by millions of pilgrims since the Middle Ages.

Thus, I sneak into the magnificent piazza, enfolded by two semicircular colonnades conceived by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the 17th century. I always feel a shiver when I turn my gaze to St. Peter’s Basilica, built between 1506 and 1615 by 18 popes and their favorite architects, including Bramante, Raphael and, of course, Michelangelo, who gave the church its divine dome.

I look toward the adjacent Vatican Apostolic Palace to see whether the pope may be passing the window of his study on the third floor, where he often appears at noon on Sundays. Pigeons wheel and the 140 Christian saints poised in stone on the roofline of the colonnade point the way to heaven. Tourists follow guides with open umbrellas or sit on the steps, apparently overwhelmed.

It is overwhelming to contemplate touring the 10-acre basilica, treasury, crypt and dome, and seven miles of galleries in the Vatican Museums. An information bureau, bookstore and post office are tucked into a low building on the south side of the piazza. But it’s far better to reserve a place in advance for one of the three excellent tours offered at the Vatican.

The Vatican Museum-Sistine Chapel tour departs from a ticket office on the north side of Vatican City and ends close to the basilica’s entrance, allowing visitors to enter St. Peter’s without standing in line. In two hours it can only skim the surface, passing by whole museums such as the Pinacoteca, or picture gallery, opened to showcase works of art stolen by Napoleon, then returned after his defeat.

What the tour does cover is the stuff of memories: the Pine Cone Courtyard, with its colossal bronze fountain, a relic of the first St. Peter’s Basilica, built beginning about AD 326 by Emperor Constantine; the Octagonal Courtyard, which displays classical statuary such as the Greek Laocoon, unearthed in Rome in 1506 and acquired by Pope Julius II, at the urging of Michelangelo; the marvelous Gallery of Maps, decorated with 40 historical-topographical maps of Italy devised in the 16th century by papal astronomer Ignazio Danti; the magnificently frescoed Raphael rooms; and, of course, the Sistine Chapel.

Michelangelo’s frescoes in the chapel are so big, busy and breathtaking that they seem almost surreal. His St. Peter’s dome, on the other hand, has a serene perfection and can best be appreciated on the Vatican gardens tour.

It takes visitors into precincts otherwise accessible only to about 1,000 priests and nuns and 2,500 laypeople who work there.

In the walled compound behind St. Peter’s are a bank, printing press, commissary, gas station, railroad, helipad, radio station, tennis court, medical clinic, hotel and offices of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s daily newspaper, as well as a 5,000-pound fragment of the Berlin Wall and a full-scale reproduction of the grotto of Lourdes.

The third tour at the Vatican is my favorite. It visits the pre-Christian necropolis underneath St. Peter’s Basilica, where excavation began in the 1940s after Roman artifacts were discovered during the burial of Pope Pius XI.

I went on an excavations, or scavi, tour led by a priest from Detroit who devotes his vacations to conducting the subterranean exploration. From an entrance on the south side of the sanctuary, the group descended on a network of narrow, winding stairs to the basement of St. Peter’s, where we saw intact Roman mausoleums -- decorated with frescoes, mosaics and statuary -- formerly sealed beneath rubble from the first basilica.

It was to this pagan necropolis that St. Peter’s body was taken after his crucifixion, many scholars believe.

We stopped precisely under the high altar where both tradition and ancient graffiti suggest that St. Peter was laid to rest, though positive proof is lacking and no further excavation is underway. But for many people, just being in this remarkable place is believing.

For me, no proof is needed. Regardless of where he was buried, St. Peter is the rock on which the Vatican was built, spiritual home to a billion Roman Catholics worldwide.

MONACO

My friend Polly Platt loves Monaco, a silver slipper of a country on a little shelf of the French Riviera not much bigger than Monte Carlo, its capital. But she also attended the wedding of Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III here in 1956, the social event of the decade.

My experience of the principality, now ruled by the late prince’s son, Albert II, was less memorable. I stopped here sans tiara a few years ago on a budget cruise and returned to the ship like a Cinderella who hadn’t been invited to the ball.

So I decided to do it in style when I returned in the spring with Sarah, my 20-year-old niece. During the Grand Prix, I booked a room for one night at the luxurious Hotel Port Palace overlooking the harbor and got tickets to watch a day of practice runs from the grandstand.

On the drive from Marseille, France, we stopped to have our rented Volvo station wagon washed and polished just to make a good impression in the car-crazy principality, home of Formula One’s most glamorous race since 1929.

We had our choice of the low, middle or high corniche, as the roads that ply the 20-mile strip of Mediterranean coast between Nice, France, and the Italian border are known. Even the low one, which we chose, can be hair-raising, especially with a punctured tire -- but that came later. Meantime, the sky was blue, we were drinking diet colas and Sarah was spinning CDs.

Once we crossed the border into Monaco we hit traffic, diversions and barricades. During the Grand Prix (which takes place about the same time as the nearby Cannes Film Festival) the streets of waterfront Monte Carlo are turned into a tight, 2-mile track with a tunnel and 19 treacherous hairpin curves. F1 champion Nelson Piquet once said that driving the course is like riding a bike in a living room.

Sarah and I don’t know a pole position (the top starting spot in an F1 event) from a chicane (an S-curve on a course), but we were willing to learn while indulging ourselves at the Port Palace. The hotel occupies a stylish high-rise decorated with vintage photos of such movie stars as Jean-Paul Belmondo and Clint Eastwood.

Cinched in by the Grand Prix course on two sides, its front door is at harbor level and its rooftop terrace is on Avenue d’Ostende, which yields directly to Monte Carlo’s fabled Belle Epoque-style casino.

Our double room overlooked the harbor, at the moment full of yachts with front-row views of the track from their polished decks. The rate for the night was $400, in line with premium prices during the five-day Grand Prix when businesses in the principality pull in as much as they make during five months of low season.

That night, Sarah and I put on frocks and high-heeled sandals to visit the casino, surrounded by fountains and flower gardens. We didn’t ante up to get into the gaming rooms, but we did check out a photo exhibition in the marble-lined atrium of past Grand Prix champs including Michael Schumacher, who logged the fastest time for a lap in 2004 (about a minute and 14 seconds).

Outside, a Bentley was pulling up at the fabled Hotel de Paris, built in 1864. But when we tried to enter, the doorman turned us back, pointing to our apparently inappropriate footwear. So we adjourned to the equally sumptuous Hotel Metropole nearby for cocktails, which cost twice as much as the pizza we had for dinner later.

Oh, well, you only go around once, right?

Wrong. At 8:30 the next morning, F1 vehicles were going round and round the circuit on practice runs, making a noise halfway between a swarm of wasps and a jackhammer. Sarah, who has long, blond hair, rushed to the window and she caught the eyes of Renault Team members, positioned below to aid their drivers.

After breakfast we made our way to the business district along Rue Grimaldi, where the Automobile Club of Monaco, which sponsors the event, had a boutique selling Grand Prix T-shirts, watches and ear plugs. A booth nearby was renting hand-held TV monitors so sports fans could follow the progress on the track wherever they went.

We watched for a while from our grandstand seats in front of the harbor, then climbed to the upper town atop the rock where a fortress has stood since the 13th century. In 1297 Francois Grimaldi, an exiled nobleman from Genoa, entered the fort disguised as a monk, thereby gaining temporary control of the stronghold. The Grimaldis ultimately became the sovereign lords of Monaco, thanks to treaties forged with France.

Their palace at the summit of the rock is open to visitors. So Sarah and I took the tour, with audio guides narrated by Prince Albert II. We admired the red and gold chamber where the English Duke of York died while visiting the principality on a sailing vacation in 1767 and the many portraits of beautiful Princess Grace, whose death in a 1982 car accident stunned the world.

Then Sarah and I had to hit the road because 24 hours at the Monaco Grand Prix was all we could afford. On our way out of the principality, an alert policeman pulled us over to warn us that our rear right tire was low. Lacking a backup team, we found a garage in Ventimiglia, just across the Italian border, where a nice young mechanic found a puncture and got us back on track.

SAN MARINO

“Go slow. There isn’t a lot to see,” an attendant at a tourist information office told me when I drove into the Most Serene Republic of San Marino. Her candor was, I soon discovered, just one aspect of the wee country’s singularity.

Set on an outcropping of the Apennine Mountains, it is the world’s oldest republic, based on its founding in the early part of the 4th century. At that time, a Christian stonemason named Marinus (Italianized to Marino), forced by agents of the Roman Emperor Diocletian to work at the Adriatic seaport of Rimini, escaped to 2,500-foot Mt. Titano about 10 miles west. The little settlement that collected around him was apparently too poor and remote to be worth Roman reprisal, so Marino (who was eventually canonized) could say to his compatriots on his deathbed, “I leave you free.”

The commune managed to remain that way by good fortune, canny alliances and pluck. Its independence was confirmed by several popes and, after finding refuge there in the wars leading up to the 1870 union of the Italian peninsula, republican leader Giuseppe Garibaldi did not insist on incorporating San Marino into the modern state of Italy that now surrounds it.

San Marino’s motto, “Libertas,” appears on its crest, along with the three towers built in the Middle Ages atop Mt. Titano.

The iconic bastions reared up boldly as I followed a switchbacking road to the old town and capital of San Marino, a car-free zone built on a series of terraces. Near the main gate a policeman gave me a map showing about a dozen parking lots tucked around the hill town. I found a spot close to the top, then carried my bag to the nearby Hotel Rosa, underneath the first tower, known as La Rocca.

Like everything in Italian-speaking San Marino, the hotel and its terrace restaurant exude good government. My modern single on the second floor lacked charm, but it had a window with a pleasing view over the roofs of the old town. Moreover, the Hotel Rosa is just a few doors away from the Waxworks Museum.

San Marino also has Curiosity, Torture and Modern Weaponry museums, legions of bus tourists and a virtual plague of souvenir shops, where you’ll find items as diverse as designer watches and Native American headdresses. Most interesting are the stores devoted to imitation weapons, with medieval maces alongside AK-47s. I was starting to wonder whether “Libertas” had evolved into San Marino-style Libertarianism when a shopkeeper explained that the weapons are purchased mostly by historical re-enactors.

A quick stroll that afternoon told me that the town caters wholeheartedly to visitors, later confirmed when I read in a brochure that half the republic’s revenue comes from tourism. Travelers stultified by places such as Colonial Williamsburg, Va.; Stratford-upon-Avon, England; and Carcassonne, France; would be well warned to stay away. But I can cope with tourist traps, so I unpacked and had dinner at the Hotel Rosa.

San Marino cuisine resembles that of nearby Italian regions, including Emilia-Romagna, with plentiful seafood from the nearby Adriatic. I had a delicious fried calamari starter, followed by baby clam spaghetti in red sauce. The meal was accompanied by a half carafe of highly palatable red wine from one of San Marino’s 13 commercial vintners.

The next morning I began exploring the old town by having my picture taken with a guard in a white-feathered shako at the Palazzo Pubblico on the Piazza della Liberta. The boxy, faux medieval building, surmounted by a clock tower, is the seat of San Marino’s singular government, overseen by two captains-regent who stand for reelection every six months.

The 19th century San Marino Basilica above the Piazza della Liberta enshrines the founding saint’s bones. Below is the post office, which sells prized San Marino stamps and coins, and the State Museum. It has a collection of forgettable Italian Baroque paintings and a far more interesting display of pendants, earrings, hairpins and necklaces from the Treasure of Domagnano, found nearby in the tomb of a 6th century noblewoman. Alas, most of the items are reproductions of originals now at museums in Berlin, London and New York.

I saw a medieval crossbow demonstration, took the funicular down to the hamlet of Borgo Maggiore, then walked a path along the ridgeline of Mt. Titano, passing all three towers. It’s said that from here you can sometimes see right across the Adriatic to the coast of Croatia. But all I could spy was the territory of San Marino spread over the surrounding hills and valleys.

At breakfast the next morning I was beginning to think the woman at the information office was right. Having visited all the major sights, I couldn’t figure out how to spend my last day in San Marino. But then I remembered the view from Mt. Titano and set out in the car to sample the pleasures of the countryside.

The capital is surrounded by eight little townships, known as castellos for their ancient hilltop castles, where most of the country’s 30,000 residents live. It took 10 minutes to reach pretty Fiorentino, where I stopped at a supermarket and bought a sandwich.

I planned to picnic in neighboring Montegiordano. But when I got there, an innkeeper told me to go to Albereto di Montescudo, an even smaller hill town reached by a precariously winding one-lane road. Somewhere along the way I must have crossed the border because Albereto is in Italy.

In the Middle Ages, the diminutive castello was controlled by the fearsome Malatesta family from Rimini. Now it’s an elegant restaurant with a terrace overlooking Mt. Titano.

While my sandwich spoiled in the car, I had lunch, starting with a plate of divine pistachio and artichoke ravioli. A fillet of white fish in puttanesca sauce came next and dessert was cinnamon gelato with an espresso.

All the while, I gazed across the valley at the triple towers, wondering why we need big countries anyway, when there are beautiful, free and idiosyncratic small ones like San Marino.

LIECHTENSTEIN

In most hotel rooms, you find a little bit of sightseeing information. The room I booked at a hotel in Liechtenstein -- where tax-sheltered banking generates almost a third of the gross domestic product -- had a brochure on asset management.

I didn’t stay there because it was right by a noisy road, but I pocketed the brochure, just in case.

There are, of course, sights to see in the little German-speaking principality, tucked into the Alps between Switzerland and Austria.

The Rhine River runs wide and icy-white along the western border, and the prince’s cross-timbered castle nestles in an aerie on the mountainside.

At seemingly every turn, there are trail heads and bike paths.

Pretty, flower-wreathed towns dot the lowlands.

A winding road leads east into the mountains, through a tunnel and across meadows to the ski area of Malbun, which attracts outdoorsy families in the summer.

But in my head all the while I was here I kept hearing the hum of secret corporate accounts earning tax-free dividends instead of “The Sound of Music.”

I drove to Liechtenstein from Zurich, Switzerland, a scenic trip around lakes and across Alpine valleys that takes less than two hours. When I turned off the highway headed for Vaduz I passed dairy farms, Swiss chalets and an industrial zone neater than a pin where factories make calculators and dentures.

Vaduz turned out to be a modern town with a pedestrian-only main street lined by sidewalk cafes. After leaving the first hotel, I went to the visitor information booth there to find another place to stay. The helpful attendant got me a room in the town of Balzers near the principality’s southern border and talked me into buying a ticket for the motorized Vaduz City Train, an It’s-a-Small-World-After-All attraction that reveals the town’s charms in 15 minutes.

After the train ride, I toured the National Museum, which tells the story of Liechtenstein from prehistory to the Middle Ages, when it passed through many hands until its purchase by a family of Austrian nobles around 1700. The acquisition came with a princely title, though the family waited more than 100 years to move to Liechtenstein.

Some of the princely family’s modern art is on display at the nearby Kunstmuseum, along with temporary exhibitions. But the museum’s best surprise is its first-floor sushi bar, where I had an early dinner before trying to find my hotel.

The road from Vaduz to Balzers is a disconsolate suburban strip. But the mountainside town is affable, made up of well-tended houses surrounded by horse pastures and gardens, the kind of place where you could send your kids out to play with no worries.

The next day I drove around Liechtenstein, bought a half-case of red wine from the princely family’s vineyard near Vaduz and finally broached the front door of LGT, the royal family’s bank, where I asked a customer service representative if I could open an account.

He looked at me strangely and asked where I was from.

When I told him I was American, he said I couldn’t open an account in Liechtenstein because of U.S. banking regulations, but I’m pretty sure it was my Birkenstocks.

ANDORRA

Outside a church on my first morning in Andorra, I met a dapper man who looked about 60 and was wearing a suit coat with a silk handkerchief in the front pocket. He noticed that I was trying to read my map upside down and asked whether he could help.

After we’d talked for a while he asked me how old I thought he was. The average life expectancy in Andorra is 83, so I figured this was a trick question. But before I could come up with an answer he did a little twist and said he was 93. Then he pulled out his driver’s license to prove it.

If first impressions are everything, he’s the reason I took a shine to Andorra, but I found many others during my visit. Though locked in the mountains like Liechtenstein, Andorra is three times bigger, so there’s more to see. And these mountains are the Catalonian Pyrenees, culturally flavored by Spain, where people stay up late and know how to party.

Andorra lines a high pass in the Pyrenees between France and Spain. I drove in from the north, noting the long line of cars headed in the opposite direction, stalled at a customs booth on the French border, where officials were opening trunks to inspect the loads of purchases leaving Andorra, a tax-free shopping mecca.

Pas de la Casa, the first town I came to, has a duty-free mall, like those in airports, and two route options for people going onward: a long, toll tunnel or the switchbacking road I chose that crosses the 7,900-foot Envalira Pass before plunging into Andorra.

From there, the highway follows a branch of the Valira River past a chain of ski resorts, a hydroelectric plant and the monstrous, pinnacle-shaped Caldea spa complex to the nation’s capital, Andorra la Vella, a densely packed modern city in a widening of the valley.

The Hotel Pyrenees, where I booked a room for three nights, is in the upper town. It’s clean, efficient and friendly and has a beautiful swimming pool on the roof of an adjacent parking structure.

I took a dip and then went for a walk in the old town, a small district of stone buildings surrounding Casa de la Vall, which was Andorra’s administrative center when it was co-ruled by the Spanish bishop of Urgell and the French king.

Technically, the bishop and the president of France remain its co-princes, but Andorra now has a democratically elected parliament and ministries in modern buildings below the nearby Piazza of the People.

Beyond that, Andorra la Vella seemed to me chiefly a conglomeration of shopping malls that attract day-trippers from France and Spain seeking tax-free luxury goods such as perfume and watches. The summer sales were on, but even so, things seemed expensive, except for shoes, which is why I had to find room in my suitcase for two new pairs of sandals.

One night I had charbroiled chicken at an Argentine barbecue near my hotel. The next night I found Ca la Conxita, a restaurant decorated like a Hallmark Halloween card, which serves local fare without a menu. The owner sat at my table and told me what she could prepare. I chose steak, followed by a watermelon slice.

It was easy to fill my days in Andorra visiting such historic sites as Casa Cristo, which occupies a four-story farmhouse left as it was when the family that lived there moved from the hamlet Encampin in 1947.

It is an ethnographic museum dedicated to the old days, when Andorra produced tobacco for snuff. A few fields nearby are still devoted to big-leafed, pink-flowering tobacco plants, now used for cigarettes.

Every little town seems to have an old Romanesque chapel built of rough stone in the Middle Ages. My favorite, in the village of Santa Coloma just south of the capital, has a round bell tower and traces of Gothic frescoes.

The restored ruins of another cherished Andorran chapel are on a hillside in Meritxell, where legend has it that an image of the Virgin Mary appeared miraculously. When the chapel burned in 1972, a striking new sanctuary was built.

Farther north at Arcalis I hiked to Tristaina Lake, set in a scree-covered cirque, where I sat eating a sandwich, despairing of the march of the clock but appreciating the view. So little time, so many small countries to see.

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susan.spano@latimes.com

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*--* EUROPE’S SMALLEST 10 Rank/City Area Comparison 1. Vatican City 0.2 sq. miles Slightly bigger than the San Diego Zoo 2. Monaco 1 sq. mile Disneyland 3. San Marino 24 sq. miles About the size of Pasadena 4. Liechtenstein 62 sq. miles Original Hearst Ranch near San Simeon 5. Malta 122 sq. miles The size of Denver 6. Andorra 181 sq. miles About the surface area of Lake Tahoe 7. Luxembourg 998 sq. miles About two-thirds the size of Rhode Island 8. Cyprus 3,572 sq. miles Delaware and Rhode Island combined 9. Kosovo 4,203 sq. miles San Diego County 10. Montenegro 5,333 sq. miles Slightly smaller than Connecticu t Source: National Geographic Society / Los Angeles Times *--*