Il Blog di Paolo Guizzardi (PaoloG)

On the evening of January 19, 2023 the Consiglio Grande e Generale, the Parliament of San Marino, has approved by a vast majority (25 votes in favor, 2 against, 2 abstensions and 2 absent) the Istanza d'Arengo (popular petition) which called the small country participation in Project Titan. According to this plan, San Marino will submit the United Nations a proposal for the creation of an UN Office tasked with the preparation of a periodic World UN Conference on the studies of the UAP phenomenon to be held in, and by care of, San Marino. A truly historical event that could pose the basis for important developments.
For those who are not familiar with the Project, here are links to my previous articles where I had previously reported on the genesis and developments of Project Titan

• December 12, 2021 - PROJECT TITAN - SAN MARINO, UFOS AND THE UN, on the genesys of the Project
• January 12, 2022 - PROJECT TITAN, an update on the meeting with the Capitani Reggenti
• July 20, 2022 - PROJECT TITAN - A NEW STRATEGY, on the change of strategy to propose the Project to the Sammarinese authorities
• September 1, 2022 - PROJECT TITAN - INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC PETITION CAMPAIGN, on the email unofficial campaign to support the Project
• October 24, 2022 - ALEA IACTA EST!, on the greenlighting of the Istanza d'Arengo for parliamentary debate.

For the benefit of those readers who are not familiar with the genesis of the Project, here is a short resume. The others can skip to the next paragraph.

The idea of this Project came to this writer to fulfill an old wish of Roberto Pinotti, the Italian most prominent ufologist and president of the Centro Ufologico Nazionale of Italy (CUN), of which I was a member. His wish was reviving the true spirit of the Grenada UN initiative, that is having the UFO phenomenon taken into consideration by the United Nations. He knew that San Marino was perfectly suited to host an international event of that kind, being a full UN member state and a neutral country. In the eighties he had tried various times to stimulate San Marino authorities in this sense, but the times were not ripe.
It was only in the Spring of 2019, when this writer became confident that the process of disclosure that had started in mid December 2017 with the historical New York Times article was not a fatuous fire that I understood the time had come to roll up my sleeves.
To make a long story short, after various periods of stop and go, hesitations and various inconvenients, I managed to create a first draft of a project. It was named Titan, after the name of the mountain on which San Marino City lies. But it was quickly clear that such a project would have been too much for an organization like the Centro Ufologico Nazionale alone. Fortunately, in that period ICER, the International Coalition for Extratrrestrial Research was being created, and the two organizations soon joined forces to bring forward Project Titan.
At mid-September 2021 the Project was informally presented to the Minister of Public Instruction and University of San Marino after the conclusion of the 30th Int'l CUN UFO Symposium. Later, in mid-December 2022 it was also presented to the two Heads of State of San Marino, the Capitani Reggenti. But in spite of the interest manifested, no reaction were received from San Marino authorities.
After six months of silence from Mount Titan, this writer once more had to pull up his sleeves, this time to find a more suitable way to propose participation in Project Titan to the authorities of San Marino. So, after some search in the Sammarinese legal system, I found an ancient institute called the Istanza d'Arengo, which appeared fit for the purpose. The Istanza is basically a popular petition. As such, it has to be signed and submitted by sammarinese citizens only. Having noted that a number of San Marino citizens had manifested a concrete interest for the Project and were willing to sign an Istanza d'Arengo to ask that San Marino took part in Project Titan, I decided to go that way. As I had written reporting on the preparation of the text of the Project, it was again a matter of putting on paper an organic, well-documented petition structured in a way that maximized the chances of success. This resulted in a rather meaty document that, with all the annexes, consisted of about fifty pages in total. Once the Petition was ready, we activated the signature collection campaign, which enabled us to collect signatures from a dozen San Marino citizens:

San Marino, September 22, 2022 - The first three signatures collected for the Istanza d'Arengo and the title page thereof. The first signer is Mr. Maurizio Pinotti, Roberto's brother. In the photo, from left, Mr. Augusto Casali, the undersigned and Roberto Pinotti - photo by the author

The Istanza was then sumbitted on Oct. 2nd, as mandated by the law that regulates the institution.

Oct. 2, 2022 - A selfie of Maurizio Pinotti (left) and Augusto Casali - the first two signatories of the Istanza d'Arengo - in front of the Government Palace in San Marino shortly before making their entrance for the submission of the Istanza d'Arengo - image kindly provided by Roberto Pinotti