San Remo — The Riviera's Living City
- 4B Travel Guide
- May 21
- 12 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
4B Travel Guide | Liguria · Italian Riviera
San Remo (Sanremo) is the Italian Riviera at full volume. Where Bordighera whispers, San Remo sings — literally, as the home of the Festival della Canzone Italiana, the song contest that has shaped Italian pop music for seventy years. This is a city of grand Belle Époque ambition: a casino that belongs in a film set, a seafront of monumental palm-lined elegance, and behind it all, one of the most atmospheric medieval old towns in Liguria — La Pigna — climbing its steep hill in tight spirals of vaulted lanes that most visitors never find.
Special Info: We visited in May, and we were lucky enough to be guided by local friends who knew every corner of the city and every table worth sitting at. Their company, their hints, and their generosity made San Remo reveal itself in ways no guidebook can fully replicate.
4BTravelGuide Photos San Remo: https://photos.app.goo.gl/UkEY3WHj6ki5ChHt5
Tour Summary
San Remo is an excellent multi-day destination in its own right.
The city rewards those who go beyond the lungomare and the casino — into La Pigna, into the flower market, into the back-street bars where locals drink Rossese and talk football. With the right company and enough time, it gives back considerably more than it first appears to offer.
Originally settled by Ligurian tribes and later Romans, Sanremo was a small fishing village vulnerable to Barbary pirates.
The name derives from "San Romolo" (Saint Romulus), the town's patron saint. Medieval fortifications and a castle were built for defense; the old town clings to the hillside of this defensive tradition.
Quick Facts
Fact | Details |
Location | Province of Imperia, Liguria; 20 km east of Bordighera |
Best Reached By | Train from Bordighera (12 min) or car via Via Aurelia |
Duration | Half day minimum; full day recommended; 2–3 days as a base |
Best Time | April–June and September–October |
Interests | History, architecture, food, beaches, cycling, flowers, music |
Physical Effort | Easy (lungomare and new town); moderate (La Pigna climb) |
Language | Italian; English in tourist areas |
Location
San Remo sits on a wide south-facing bay in western Liguria, sheltered by the Maritime Alps behind and open to the full warmth of the Ligurian Sea. It is the largest city on this stretch of coast — genuinely urban in a way that Bordighera and Menton are not — with 55,000 inhabitants, a functioning commercial port, and the dense, layered energy of a city that has been important for a very long time.
The Via Aurelia coastal road and the railway both pass directly through; the autostrada runs on the hillside above.
Why Visit San Remo?
San Remo is the Riviera with real urban life behind it — a city where the Belle Époque grandeur of the casino and the lungomare gives way, one block inland, to the medieval labyrinth of La Pigna and the workaday reality of one of Europe's great flower markets. It is complicated, layered, and far more interesting than its postcard image suggests.
History of San Remo
San Remo's history follows the arc of every great Riviera city: ancient Ligurian settlement, Roman transit point on the Via Julia Augusta, medieval hilltop fortification, and then — with the arrival of the railway in 1872 — an explosive transformation into one of the most fashionable winter resorts in Europe.
Russian aristocrats, British nobility, and Central European royalty built their villas on the hillsides above the seafront.
Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite and founder of the Nobel Prize, spent his final years here and died in his Villa Nobel in 1896. The Swedish Royal Family maintained a presence in San Remo for decades.
The Festival della Canzone Italiana — the San Remo Music Festival — began in 1951 and rapidly became the defining event of Italian popular culture, launching the careers of generations of Italian singers and watched by millions on television every February. It continues today, filling every hotel in the city and turning the Teatro Ariston into a national obsession for five days each year.
Main Attractions
Pista Ciclabile — The Coastal Cycling Path
One of the finest leisure cycling routes in Italy runs from Ospedaletti, just west of San Remo, east to Santo Stefano al Mare — 24 kilometres of car-free cycling path on the bed of the old coastal railway, following the sea the entire way. The route passes through the old stations (now converted into bars and rest stops), through tunnels blasted through the headlands, and over viaducts with open sea views. Bicycles and e-bikes are available for rent at multiple points along the route.
Practical: The path is flat throughout. E-bikes make the return leg effortless. Allow half a day for the full return journey.
Villa Ormond and Its Park
One of San Remo's most beautiful and undervisited treasures sits quietly above the city centre — a large Belle Époque villa surrounded by one of the finest public parks on the western Ligurian Riviera.
Villa Ormond was built in the late 19th century by the wealthy Ormond family and set within an extraordinary botanic garden that reflects the ambitions and exotic tastes of the Riviera's golden age.
The park is free to enter and open daily — a rare and generous gift to the city.
The Park — What to Expect
The Parco Ormond is a 4-hectare garden of considerable botanical variety, planted in the English landscape style with winding paths, large specimen trees, and a strong collection of exotic and Mediterranean species that thrive in San Remo's exceptional microclimate.
Highlights of the park:
🌴 The Palm Collection — mature date palms and Canary Island palms of impressive age, giving the garden its distinctly North African atmosphere that defines this entire stretch of coast
🎋 Japanese Garden Section — a small but beautifully maintained Japanese-inspired corner with bamboo, stone lanterns, and a water feature. An unexpected and peaceful discovery inside an Italian Riviera park
🌺 Exotic Species — the mild Ligurian winter allows plants from the southern hemisphere, the Canaries, and subtropical Asia to grow in the open air. The collection includes dragon trees, cycads, and flowering species that would not survive a single northern winter
🌿 Large Specimen Trees — several trees of exceptional age and size, including a magnificent Ficus macrophylla (Moreton Bay fig) whose aerial roots have colonised a large section of the garden
🏡 Quiet Terraces and Benches — the park has several shaded seating areas where locals come to read, eat lunch, and escape the summer heat of the city below. Genuinely peaceful even in high season
Hint! The park is one of the best picnic spots in San Remo — buy provisions at the Mercato Coperto five minutes away and eat under the palms. Entirely free, entirely lovely.
Villa Ormond — The Building
The villa itself is a handsome late 19th-century building in the eclectic Riviera style — rendered facade, arched loggia, shuttered windows, and the kind of generous proportions that the Belle Époque built without hesitation. It is used today as a cultural centre hosting exhibitions, concerts, and civic events. The interior is open when events are scheduled — worth checking the San Remo events calendar before your visit, as the rooms retain much of their original character.
The villa hosts the Centro Culturale Villa Ormond, which organises regular cultural programming through the year — classical music concerts in the garden in summer are particularly atmospheric.
The Mayor's Villa — Villa Comunale
A short walk from Villa Ormond, the Villa Comunale — historically associated with the civic life of San Remo and known locally as the Mayor's Villa — is another surviving example of the grand residential architecture that once lined the hillsides above the lungomare. The building represents the layer of San Remo that existed between the extravagance of Nobel's villa and the commercial energy of the port: prosperous, cultivated, and architecturally confident.
The surrounding garden is integrated into the broader green corridor of the upper city — a quiet escape from the busier streets below, with views over the rooftops towards the sea.
What makes it worth a stop:
The exterior architecture — a textbook example of Ligurian Belle Époque civic building
The garden terracing, which follows the natural slope of the hillside in the manner of the old agricultural terraces that preceded the villas
The view from the upper garden level back over San Remo and the bay
La Pigna — The Medieval Old Town
La Pigna — named for its pine-cone shape when seen from the sea — is the reason to go beyond the lungomare. It is a steep, tightly wound medieval city rising above the modern town in concentric rings of lanes, arches, and stairways, almost entirely car-free and still genuinely inhabited.
Our local friends led us up through it on a warm May evening, through lanes so narrow the buildings overhead nearly touch, past open doorways where families were eating dinner, through small piazzas where nothing seemed to have changed since the 15th century. Without them, we would have been lost within five minutes and delighted throughout.
At the summit, the Sanctuary of the Madonna della Costa offers a panoramic view over the entire bay — the city below, the sea beyond, and on clear days the coastline curving west towards Bordighera and France.
Don't miss: the 13th-century Cathedral of San Siro at the base of La Pigna — dark, solid Romanesque, with a beautiful black Christ above the altar.
The Casino Municipale
The Casino Municipale of San Remo is not merely a gambling house — it is one of the most beautiful Belle Époque buildings in Italy, a monument of architectural ambition built in 1905 in the Moorish-eclectic style that was fashionable among Riviera resort architects of the era. The exterior, with its white onion domes and ornate terracotta detailing, is visible from across the bay. The interior — grand salons, chandeliers, gilded ceilings — can be visited without gambling, and should be. It is also the venue that hosts the San Remo Music Festival each February.
Practical: smart dress required after 3pm; bring ID.
Lungomare Imperatrice
The seafront promenade of San Remo is everything a Riviera lungomare should be: wide, palm-lined, faced by grand hotels and elegant villas, with the sea on one side and the casino gardens on the other. Named for Empress Maria Alexandrovna of Russia, who spent winters here in the 1870s, it stretches for 2 km from the old harbour westward. Walk it at any hour; it is best at the passeggiata hour — 6 to 8pm — when the entire city seems to be on its feet.
Mercato dei Fiori — The Flower Market
San Remo is the capital of the Italian flower industry — and has been since the late 19th century, when the mild microclimate and terraced hillsides above the city proved ideal for cut flower cultivation. The wholesale flower market (Mercato dei Fiori) is one of the largest in Europe: an extraordinary wholesale auction operating through the night and early morning where hundreds of millions of stems change hands each year. Carnations, roses, mimosa, and ranunculus grown on the Ligurian terraces above the city are loaded onto trucks and trains destined for Amsterdam, Paris, and London.
The market is not always open to casual visitors, but the flower-growing culture is visible everywhere — in the terraced hillsides above the city covered with greenhouses, in the flower stalls around the covered market, and in the presence of cut flowers in every bar and restaurant in the city.
Hint! Our local friends took us to a small flower grower's cooperative on the hillside above the city on a May morning — the greenhouses full of carnations, the smell extraordinary, the price of a bunch of roses approximately nothing.
Villa Nobel
Alfred Nobel — chemist, engineer, inventor of dynamite, and founder of the Nobel Prizes — chose San Remo for his final home and died here in 1896. His Villa Nobel, set in a garden above the lungomare, has been preserved as a museum dedicated to his life and work: his laboratory equipment, personal correspondence, and the extraordinary story of a man who invented the most destructive explosive of his era and left his fortune to reward those who worked for peace and human knowledge. The garden is beautiful and the museum unexpectedly moving.
7. Mercato Coperto — The Covered Market
The covered municipal market of San Remo, in the city centre a few blocks from the lungomare, is the best place to encounter the real daily life of the city. The stalls sell: vegetables from the hillside terraces, Taggiasca olives and oil from the groves above Imperia, salt-packed anchovies from the local catch, Ligurian cheeses and charcuterie, and fresh flowers at market prices. Go on Saturday morning for the full version.
Hint! Our friends bought us a jar of Taggiasca olives packed in local olive oil from a stall at the back of the market — we have been trying to find the same thing since. Ask the stallholders which oil producer they use.
8. Porto Vecchio and the Fishing Harbour
The old port of San Remo, below La Pigna and to the east of the lungomare, is a working harbour — fishing boats alongside pleasure craft, a small fish market on the quay in the morning, and several restaurants where the day's catch goes directly from boat to kitchen. Our local friends brought us here for lunch on a Tuesday in May: grilled orata (sea bream), a carafe of Vermentino, bread with olive oil, and the sound of the harbour. One of the best meals of the trip.
Eating in San Remo
Ligurian cuisine in San Remo leans slightly richer than in Bordighera — more meat, more elaborate preparations, a stronger French influence in the sauces. Our friends steered us away from the tourist menus on the lungomare and into the back streets of the city, where the real eating happens.
What to order:
Farinata — chickpea flatbread, eaten standing at a sciamadda bakery at noon. Non-negotiable.
Trofie al pesto — the canonical Ligurian pasta with the finest basil in the world
Acciughe di Liguria — local anchovies, marinated, fried, or in salsa verde
Coniglio alla sanremese — rabbit braised with olives, pine nuts, and white wine; the city's signature meat dish
Sardenaira — San Remo's own version of pizza, topped with tomato, anchovies, capers, and olives. Thinner and more savoury than Neapolitan pizza. Order it at any bakery.
Rossese di Dolceacqua — the local red wine, light and fragrant. Our friends ordered it everywhere and were always right to do so.
Our favourite experience: a late lunch with our local friends at a small trattoria behind the covered market — no menu in English, paper tablecloth, handwritten daily specials, and three hours of conversation about San Remo, Ligurian food, and the correct way to prepare brandacujun. The kind of meal that is only possible with people who know the city.
Hint! Ask your hotel or any local for the nearest sciamadda — the traditional Ligurian fry shop selling farinata, torta di verdure, and fried fish. There is always one within two blocks. It is always correct.
Walks in San Remo
Walk 1 — La Pigna Ascent: Enter from Piazza Eroi Sanremesi and climb through the concentric rings of medieval lanes to the Sanctuary of the Madonna della Costa at the top. The complete ascent takes 30–40 minutes; allow double that to stop, look, and occasionally get deliberately lost. Descent via the opposite side for different views.
Walk 2 — Lungomare Circuit: From the old port along the full length of the Lungomare Imperatrice to the casino gardens and back — 4 km, completely flat, 1 hour at a relaxed pace.
Walk 3 — Via Julia Augusta Trail: Sections of the ancient Roman road are still walkable in the hills above San Remo — the tourist office has a trail map. The path passes through old olive groves and abandoned terraces with extraordinary views over the bay.
Day Trips from San Remo
San Remo makes an equally good base to Bordighera for day trips across the western Ligurian Riviera:
Bordighera (20 min west by train) — old town, Monet's palms, the Pallanca Exotic Garden
Dolceacqua (25 min inland by car) — medieval bridge, Doria castle, Rossese wine
Cervo (30 min east by car) — the perfect small medieval village above the sea
Taggia (10 min east) — a large and undervisited medieval village with an important Dominican convent
Monaco (40 min west by train) — the principality, Oceanographic Museum, and organised excess
Getting There
By train: 12 minutes from Bordighera; 50 minutes from Nice; 2h from Genova. San Remo has two stations — San Remo (main, central) and Arma di Taggia (eastern suburbs).
By car: Via Aurelia coastal road from Bordighera (25 min); autostrada A10, exit San Remo.
Cycling: The coastal cycling path connects San Remo to Ospedaletti and Santo Stefano al Mare.
A Final Word
We arrived in San Remo as day-trippers from Bordighera on a warm May morning and stayed until well after dark, guided throughout by local friends who treated the city the way only people who truly love a place can — showing us not the monuments but the spaces between them, not the restaurant on the lungomare but the trattoria behind the market, not the view from the tourist terrace but the view from the top of La Pigna at sunset with a glass of Rossese in hand. San Remo rewarded our time in the way that only complicated, layered cities can. Go beyond the lungomare. Climb La Pigna. Find a sciamadda. And if you are lucky enough to have a local friend, follow them without question.
4B Travel Guide | San Remo — Ligurian Riviera Edition
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