One week a year, all of Italy looks here: the Song Festival, at home in the Ariston theatre since 1951, made Sanremo a proper noun of national culture. The rest of the year the "city of flowers" tends its other records: the flower market supplying Europe, the 1905 Art Nouveau casino, the finish of Milan-Sanremo — cycling's longest classic — and a 24-kilometre bike path on the old railway line above the sea.
La Pigna, the spiral-shaped old town, and the Russian church tell the other Sanremo: the one of holidaying tsars and genuine alleyways.
Near Sanremo
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
