San Marino weather and the best time to visit

Autumn is the wet season here, not winter

The Italian-summer picture most people carry into a trip to San Marino is half right. July and August are dry - 40 and 57 mm - and July, at 28 C, is the only month above the comfortable band. What surprises people is the other end: September, October and November take 83, 95 and 100 mm, the three wettest months of the year, and December still takes 86.

So the shape of the year is a dry, hot midsummer with the rain stacked either side of it and weighted heavily to the autumn. May, June and August to October average 18-27 C by day and are what this page picks; May and June, at 82 and 50 mm, are the drier half of that.

A ridge, not a plain

San Marino's historic centre stands on top of Monte Titano, above the plain it looks out over toward the Adriatic. That is the whole explanation for two things a visitor notices.

The first is that it is cooler and windier than the coast a short drive away - the same afternoon that is still and hot in Rimini can be moving air on the ridge. The second is cloud: a ridge standing above a plain catches low cloud that the plain never sees, so the view that is the reason to come can be inside the weather rather than above it. Autumn, the wet season, is when that is most likely.

If the view matters more than the temperature, the dry midsummer is the safer bet despite the 28 C.