Nestled in the hills of Liguria, Italy, sits the village of Seborga. In 954 AD, the territory was granted to Benedictine monks, and in 1079 it was elevated to a Principality of the Holy Roman Empire. Problems began in 1729 when the Prince-Abbots sold the sovereign territory to the House of Savoy, rulers of the Kingdom of Sardinia.
However, the legal purchase was never properly recorded in regional archives, nor was Seborga specifically listed in the official deed of sale. Furthermore, when European powers redrew continental boundaries at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 following the Napoleonic Wars, Seborga was entirely omitted from the treaty documents. Decades later, during the Unification of Italy in 1861 and the founding of the Italian Republic in 1946, Seborga was again left out of official annexation acts.
In the 1960s, local flower vendor Giorgio Carbone uncovered these historic legal oversights. Reasoning that Seborga had never legally joined Sardinia, Savoy, or modern Italy, Carbone persuaded villagers to reassert their historical sovereignty. The village elected him as Prince Giorgio I, adopted its own flag, minted its own currency called the Luigino, and established a celebrated micronation based entirely on an 18th-century paperwork omission.