The Little Tour: A Journey to Europe's Four Minature States

One fine day in April, the two collaborators, and a lady photographer, set sail from Southampton in a wine ship bound for Bordeaux, with the comforting knowledge that the discoveries they intended to make in the Lilliputian states of Europe were assured, in advance, of such immortality as publication could afford. Their journey was to take them first to Andorra, perched on top of the eastern Pyrenees between France and Spain, 5,000 feet above sea level, its 7,000 inhabitants ruled by two princes, one Spanish, One French; then to Monaco, a name which brings to most minds a tiny ball of white ivory skimming the edge of a revolving wheel, a country that is a game - but a country whose foundation goes back to the beginning of the thirteenth century, whose present ruling family established its suzerainty in the fifteenth century and has ruled it every since; and then to the "green island, untouched by time's stream", as Liechtenstein's only poet described that central European state, a description now quoted on the brochures of the Association of Liechtenstein's Travel Agencies, though time's stream now bears a disconcerting weight of tourists; finally to San Marino, fifteen miles inland from Rimini on the Adriatic Coast, an independent republic since 855, with its one town built on the summit of a mountain, is thirty-two square miles and 1300 in habitants still represented in London by a Consul-General.