The eagle displayed

The eagle has branded. San Marino’s Expo logo.

The distractions from the serious business of the Third Wave continue, so we might as well give them some coverage. The other day we learnt the details of San Marino’s project for its presence at the 2020 Expo in Dubai. As its name suggests, this world fair was meant to take place last year. It will now open on 1 October this year, running till the end of March 2022. The decision not to rename it obviously saves a tedious rebranding, though that needs to be set against the irksome effort needed to engage people’s interest and enthusiasm in something that essentially looks as if it has already happened.

Seasoned viewers of these things advise that it may be unwise to look for exciting conceptual originality in the thematic branding of a Universal Exposition. Dubai’s motto “Connecting minds, creating the future” certainly won’t be giving anyone palpitations. The names of the three “zones” making up the Expo are only slightly less bland: “Opportunity”, “Mobility”, “Sustainability”. Does the fact that San Marino’s pavilion will be sited in the Opportunity zone mean anything? The host nation, the UAE, is in the same zone so perhaps it is a mark of prestige. Alternatively, the risk of passing unnoticed may be increased.

Doing his best to avoid this risk will be the pavilion designer, Rimini-based architect Francesco Ammirati, working in tandem with the local digital design firm AC&D Solutions, on the basis of an original concept produced by students of San Marino University. Details of the pavilion are not yet available on the relevant page of the Expo website but we do know enough to have a sense of the delights it will offer. It will have a total floor area of 340 square metres over two levels, which is appropriately titchy in the context of the Expo. But then some of the most talked-about structures at the Expo are smaller national pavilions – the Moroccan one is a fine example – so there is no reason why Ammirati cannot help San Marino make a splash with the building itself. One feels less sanguine about the content. Three of its four rooms will focus respectively on tourism, the economy and commercial activity, the last being essentially a retail outlet for the twenty-two local enterprises that have responded to the invitation to participate. It would be lovely if the tourism display were to include a few items on loan from the Republic’s gloriously awful waxwork museum, but it seems it will be dominated instead by input from the Federation of balestrieri or crossbowmen, with a real-life crossbow loaned for the occasion. The section on the economy (referred to in the press release as the sistema paese or national ‘system’) is unlikely to detain the interest of those who want to know how the San Marino economy really does work.

The fourth room – dedicated to ‘history’ – will probably be the only one that rises above the anodyne. As announced long ago, the focus will be on the highly significant early medieval Domagnano hoard, which having been found within San Marino’s borders in the early 1890s was soon almost entirely dispersed among collectors and museums elsewhere. Three years ago the ambitious plan was to re-unite the treasure for the Expo. This would have entailed negotiating complex, high-profile loans from institutions such as the British Museum, the Met in New York and the Nuremberg Museum, which holds one of the pair of stunning eagle-shaped fibulae. The other is now in the Louvre Abu Dhabi; it was, essentially, this that prompted the idea to focus on the Domagnano objects at the Expo. We do not yet know what has been achieved on this front but it is unlikely, to put it mildly, that major museums of the sort named will have leapt at the chance to loan such precious items for display at a trade fair, no matter how swanky.

This, sadly, is what happens when you do not possess the one item of truly international significance from your material national heritage. But then the objects constituting the Domagnano hoard were not even clearly understood as belonging together and as being “Treasures of San Marino” until 1973. One must look on the bright side. Even if none of the objects are physically present there is still a story to be told, incorporating conclusions of recent archaeological work in the area where they are believed to have been discovered. And the eagle does make for an excellent logo.