Some countries defend themselves with an army. And then there is San Marino, which for seventeen centuries has defended itself with symbols. On 28 August this year, Europe's smallest and oldest republic issued a postage stamp showing a girl with green hair, a fan in her hand and a unicorn at her side. It sounds like a children's illustration. It is in fact a rather carefully considered act of statecraft.
First, a word about the country. San Marino is a republic perched on a mountaintop and surrounded on every side by Italy, with roughly 34,000 inhabitants, no coastline and no army in the usual sense. It has existed independently for more than seventeen centuries, which makes it the oldest republic on the planet. Three towers along the ridge of Mount Titano serve as both its coat of arms and its skyline. And as with most very small states, postage stamps here are not an administrative footnote but an instrument of foreign policy - the cheapest way for the country's image to travel.
The girl is called Libertas, meaning "Liberty" - the same word inscribed on the national coat of arms. She is the work of the Italian artist Simone Legno, who in 2005 founded the brand tokidoki ("sometimes" in Japanese) together with two American partners. Behind it lies a whole universe of bright, emphatically sweet characters on T-shirts, bags, cosmetics and toys, in collaborations with Marvel, Hello Kitty and Karl Lagerfeld. If you have ever seen a colourful backpack covered in unicorns and little skulls, you have probably seen his work. In recent years, though, he has become the artist governments and institutions call on when they want to speak to people under thirty: he designed the mascot for the Italian pavilion at the 2025 World Expo in Osaka, created one for the Vatican as well, and for San Marino he made Libertas.
At Expo in Osaka, every country builds a pavilion and tries, over a few months, to explain who it is. San Marino had no hope of impressing anyone with scale, so it staked everything on an image - and the gamble paid off unexpectedly well. Pins bearing Libertas sold out, and the Japanese public took to her as one of their own. Once an Expo ends, the pavilions are dismantled and almost everything disappears; that was precisely what San Marino wanted to avoid. The solution was to move the character onto a postage stamp - the most durable and most mobile medium a state possesses.
Look closely at the drawing and you will find that almost everything in it is a quotation. The name comes from the coat of arms. The Three Towers are reflected in the girl's eyes. The blue-and-white feathers on her costume are the same feathers from the arms. Her armour, styled like a cosplay outfit, points back to the centuries in which the small republic held on to its independence. The green hair stands for nature and for the mountain itself. And the fan is a double bow - to Japan as the host of the Expo, and to Legno himself, who now lives in Tokyo. Beneath the sugary surface sits an entirely serious national coat of arms, simply translated into a language young people read without effort.
The issue itself is what philatelists call a miniature sheet - a separate sheet containing a single stamp, laid out like a small picture. The stamp has a face value of €2.25, and Libertas appears twice on the sheet: once with her fan and once astride a unicorn, holding the blue-and-white flag, surrounded by a whole procession of fantastical creatures staging a peaceful and very colourful "invasion" of Mount Titano. The sheet was printed in France in four colours plus an invisible fluorescent ink that shows up only under ultraviolet light - so the stamp has something to offer in the dark as well. Just 15,000 copies were produced, which for something with an international fan base is very few indeed.
The date was no accident either: the stamp came out on the very day the San Marino Comics festival opened in the old town, and Legno signed copies in person at the Museum of Stamps and Coins. The director of the postal service, Gian Luca Amici, put it plainly - philately is ageing along with its collectors, and issues like this one are an attempt to get young people to look at it at all. Sceptics will point out that small states have long profited from stamps on popular themes. Here, though, the case is different: Libertas is not a licensed foreign character but an image commissioned by the state and loaded entirely with its own symbolism. A country with no army and no sea is sending a girl with a fan, riding a unicorn, out into the world - and she will travel further than most official delegations.
Sources: Poste San Marino (via WOPA+), Vaccari News, San Marino RTV, Tribuna Politica Web, Libertas.sm, GiornaleSM.
