The name comes from no Saint Remus: it is a contraction of Sant'Eremo di San Romolo, the holy hermitage of Saint Romulus, the bishop of Genoa who lived as a hermit in the woods above the town and died on the slopes of Monte Bignone. Before that it was called Matutia. One week a year the whole of Italy looks here: the Festival della Canzone, at home in the Ariston theatre since 1951, has made Sanremo a proper noun of the national culture.
The rest of the year the city of flowers tends its other records: the flower market that supplies Europe, the art nouveau casino of 1905, the finish of the Milan-Sanremo — the longest of the cycling classics — and a cycle path of twenty-four kilometres on the old railway line, sheer above the sea. It also has the mildest climate in all of northern Italy, sheltered as it is by the ridge at its back. La Pigna, the spiral old town, and the Russian church tell of the other Sanremo, the one of holidaying tsars and real alleyways; the fortress of Santa Tecla, which Genoa built to keep the town in check, served as a prison until 2002. And just outside is Bussana Vecchia, the village gutted by the earthquake of 1887 and abandoned, which since the sixties artists from all over the world have put back together stone by stone.
Eremo di San Michele · Pinacoteca Rambaldi · Villa Nobel and 3 more
Pesto alla Genovese
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Nearest airport: Genova, 108 km away
Sanremo is part of 🏖️ Seaside
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📅 Every year, on 13 October
Sanremo celebrates Saint Romulus on 13 October; bishop of Genoa who lived in the 5th century, he spent much of his life in the city's woods and died there as a hermit, leading the city to change its name from Civitas Matuciana to Civitas Sancti Romuli.
Eremo di San Michele Ancient hermitage on the road to San Romolo, Sanremo: Count Toffetti, taken for King Charles Albert, lived her Pinacoteca Rambaldi One hundred paintings and a library with incunabula left by the priest Rambaldi to Coldirodi, a hamlet of Sanr Villa Nobel Alfred Nobel's last home in Sanremo, a Moorish Revival villa of 1871: now a museum of nineteenth-century inven Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Sanremo, but an easy day trip away.
