The Principality of Altamare is a colossal, safe nation, ruled by Princess Bianca III of Altamarea with a fair hand, and remarkable for its free-roaming dinosaurs, smutty television, and hatred of cheese. The compassionate, democratic, cheerful population of 7.871 billion altamareans are free to do what they want with their own bodies, and vote for whomever they like in elections; if they go into business, however, they are regulated to within an inch of their lives.

The enormous, liberal, socially-minded government juggles the competing demands of Education, Administration, and Welfare. It meets to discuss matters of state in the capital city of Marsagno. The income tax rate is 100%.

The frighteningly efficient altamarean economy, worth a remarkable 1,760 trillion Altamarean lires a year, is highly specialized and led by the Information Technology industry, with major contributions from Book Publishing and Tourism. State-owned companies are common. Average income is an amazing 223,714 Altamarean lires, and distributed extremely evenly, with little difference between the richest and poorest citizens.

Artists are pillars of society, tower block residents are each held responsible for four square inches of front lawn, commuters often break into synchronised para-para dancing for no reason at all, and children are disappointed to learn that cavemen never had a yabba-dabba-doo time riding dinosaurs to work. Crime is totally unknown. Altamare's national animal is the turtle, which frolics freely in the nation's sparkling oceans, and its national religion is secularism.

Altamare is ranked 8,136^th in the world and 1^st in Artemis for Most Subsidized Industry, scoring 10,373.88 on the Gilded Widget Scale.