The city of flowers and of the festival
On the Riviera di Ponente, near the French border, Sanremo is the most famous town on the Riviera dei Fiori, the Riviera of Flowers, known throughout Italy as the home of the Festival della Canzone Italiana, the Italian Song Festival, held every year since 1951, first at the Casino and since 1977 at the Teatro Ariston: for five evenings in February, broadcast on television, the whole country follows the competition between singers, and the city fills with artists, journalists and fans. In the late nineteenth century, Sanremo was a fashionable winter resort for the European aristocracy, especially Russian and English, who built villas, hotels and gardens along the seafront.
Of that period remain the elegant Casino, an Art Nouveau palace of 1905, one of the four casinos in Italy; the Russian Orthodox Church of Christ the Saviour, with its colourful onion domes, built in 1913 for the Russian colony; and Villa Nobel, where Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and founder of the prizes, lived and died in 1896. Behind the modern centre, the old town, called La Pigna for its pine-cone shape, is a maze of steep lanes, covered passages and stairways, which climbs up the hill to the Sanctuary of the Madonna della Costa, with a view of the city and the sea. Sanremo is also a capital of flower growing: the hills around it are covered with greenhouses, and its flower market is one of the most important in Europe; in March, the Sanremo in Fiore parade brings floats decorated with flowers through the streets. The city is the finish line of the cycling classic Milan-Sanremo.
Tip: walk up through La Pigna to the Madonna della Costa; the cycle path along the old railway, by the sea, is beautiful.
Where it is
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