What is freedom? According to Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa, freedom is to build a place where you can do whatever you want.
The idea sounds crazy, but Rosa, a marine engineer, used his expertise to put the idea into action and create the world's first man-made island nation to date.
The country is known as the "Rose Island Republic".
The establishment of the Republic of Rose Island is very simple. At a place 6 miles from the Italian coastline, a platform with an area of 400 square meters is built with 9 bridge towers.
Although the sparrow is small, Rose Island is still equipped with some commercial facilities, including restaurants, bars, nightclubs, gift shops and post offices. Some reports also mention a radio station, but this has not been confirmed.
The Republic of Rose Island was established in 1967 and declared its independence on June 24, 1968. Rosa, the "Speaker of Freedom" , called himself President and named the country after the Esperanto "Insulo de la Rozoj".
"rozo" in Esperanto (plural "rozoj") and "rosa" in Italian both mean "rose".
A number of postage stamps were subsequently issued by Rose Island, including a stamp showing Rose Island's location in the Adriatic Sea. On earlier stamps, the currency printed was "Mir", but there were no known coins or banknotes.
Giorgio Rosa's actions are considered by the Italian government to be tax evasion in order to make more money from tourists.
Although they did not know if this was Giorgio Rosa's motive, the Italian government acted decisively and sent four military police and several tax officials to land and take control of the island.
A telegram sent to the Italian government protesting "the harm caused by military occupation to sovereignty and indigenous tourism" is said to have been disregarded.
The Italian navy blew up the artificial island shortly after.
So far, this republic that existed for less than two years has since vanished into ashes and disappeared into history and the ocean.
On December 9, 2020, "Rose Island" directed by Italian director and screenwriter Sydney Sibilia (Rose Island) was released on the Netflix platform.
The film reproduces the story of the Italian Giorgio Rosa from the founding of the country to the fall of the country in a dark humorous way.
In 1968, George Rosa filed a petition to the European Commission for the protection and recognition of his islands, a seemingly confusing act that caught the European Commission's attention.
The committee immediately launched an investigation into the story behind the "Rose Island Republic" .
The story goes back to 1967, when the protagonist George Rosa got his engineer certificate.
Although he is professional and has stunts, because of his bizarre behavior and thoughts that are different from ordinary people, he is almost a walking and confusing behavior reward.
His girlfriend left him, and no company was willing to hire him.
The restless Rosa was unwilling to be ordinary, and asked his rich second-generation friend Maurizio Orlandini to build Rose Island.
Maurizio, who stole money from his father and employed innovative solutions to reduce material costs, managed to build an isolated island with running water.
An abandoned welder and his ship claim shelter from a storm and become the first inhabitants.
Wolfgang Rudy Neumann, a German who lost his nationality, became the second inhabitant and developed the island into a tourist destination with his extraordinary sales power.
Attracted by the freedom represented by Rose Island, more people began to visit. Franca, a pregnant 19-year-old girl, would like to be a waiter at the only bar on the 400-square-meter island.
As the reputation of Rose Island grew, ex-girlfriends also came to visit.
The evaluation after the visit is: the island is good, it can only dance, not a country, it is meaningless.
This upset Rosa, so he convened a cabinet meeting with the island's permanent residents, stipulating that Rose Island has its own language, currency, postal system and other amenities, including the upcoming naturalization process.
He wrote a letter to the United Nations headquarters in New York, hoping to gain official recognition and independence.
And tourists from all over the world have applied for naturalization to Rose Island.
The noisy Rose Island finally alerted the Italian government. The Italian government was full of question marks, and adopted a method of coercion and inducement, hoping to recruit Rosa and his party.
In the process, Rosa's honest father lost his job, Rudy the German got a passport, and Franca got money.
And Rosa and his Isle of Roses were warned of military strikes.
Rosa left the European Commission to defend his island, and his bravery attracted his longtime ex-girlfriend who thought he was unreliable.
Just as the island was about to be hit, Rosa and his cabinet members held hands, shoulder to shoulder, resolutely resisting the "aggression" of the Italian army against their country .
However, the arm could not twist the thigh, four military police and a bomb sunk this land of freedom, paradise on earth, and became the only country that was directly attacked and defeated by the Italian Republic.
In order to prevent similar accidents in the future, the United Nations has expanded the scope of international waters from 6 nautical miles to 12 nautical miles.
At the end of the story, Rosa lost the island and married her ex-girlfriend. The story can be regarded as having a Happy Ending.
Until Rosa passed away in 2017, he never mentioned it again, and he remained silent about Rose Island and its history throughout his life.
Before his death, Italian divers fished a brick from the bottom of the sea and gave it back to him.
There was also a line on it: Divers in Rimini are honored to return fragments of dreams to dreamers.
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