In the 1960s, Giorgio Rosa, an Italian engineer, built an artificial island 11,612 kilometres off the coast of Rimini and declared the Esperanto Republic of the Island of Roses, an area of 400 square meters where he opened a bar and dreamed of turning it into a tourist mecca.

The real story begins in 1958, when Rosa, working as an engineer in Bologna, had run into the wall of a bureaucracy that he considered useless. As he recounted in an interview in 2008, the Italian then thought of doing something that would show that one could be totally free.

“I thought of it as an absolute manifestation of freedom: I believe in freedom, in the possibility for everyone to make their own decisions. I am convinced that only in freedom there is the possibility of increasing industry, ideas, anything.”

Giorgio Rosa decided to declare independence on May 1, 1968 and the birth was made official at a press conference on June 24 of that year. An independent state, he said, with its own constitution and its own government, formed by family and friends of the founder. It had its own flag, three red roses on a white shield and an orange background. The language was Esperanto, which was not spoken by its founder, but was welcomed with great enthusiasm by the Esperanto Federation. It even issued its own stamps, now much sought after by collectors, and its’ own currency, the Mill, which never entered into circulation.

The idealist’s dream ended 55 days after the declaration of independence. First when the Italian State military occupied the island, with a dozen patrol boats from the Italian Navy that prevented any disembarkation. Rosa then sent a telegram to the President of the Republic denouncing the violation of sovereignty, and in the following weeks tried without success, to establish negotiations with the Italian government. In February of the following year, the Navy blew the island up with more than a thousand kilos of explosives. The coup de grace was provided by a storm that sank the island at the end of that month.