“What a strange place to leave a car”, she said. She being the rental car agent in Milan. I don’t think Sanremo is a “final destination” on many lists, without an airport or ferry terminal and not really near one either. It is, however, a convenient place to drop a car if one wants to save money and not pick one up in Italy and drop one off in France, which most people probably don’t do either. But with that being our game plan we found ourselves in Sanremo, final stop on the Italian leg of this trip.
We had passed through Sanremo on a train between Nice France and Genoa Italy a little over three years ago. There was a bicycle race riding through and its boardwalk looked lovely, so we made a mental note and moved onward to Genoa. So when we wanted to find a place near the French border to drop our car that bike race and boardwalk came to mind and we booked two nights at the Royal Hotel Sanremo which has been independently operated by the same family since 1872.
We arrived from Lake Como via Lugano Switzerland where we stopped for lunch, learned our Portuguese EU cell phone plans don’t work there, that they aren’t on the euro and that the parking machines only take Swiss francs (which were fortunately provided to me by the German Swiss couple who spoke to me first in German, then in Italian, then in English). I guess we should have known this, but we didn’t. We navigated back into Italy using road signage and gut instinct and drove south and then west along the E80 coastal highway, an impressive road of nearly exclusively suspension bridges and mountain tunnels. As we exited for Sanremo we were a little concerned that maybe the town we had remembered wasn’t the one we were staying in, but we turned a corner and landed on the flower-lined main road along the coast with the Ligurian Sea and boardwalk to our right and hotels to our left and knew we’d chosen the right spot.
We were greeted by the charming Italian front desk staff who had upgraded us to a suite and handed us an invite to their “summer party” a Wednesdays-only summertime soirée at the poolside where we chatted with hospitality manager and native Sanremoan, Catarina, while drinking some whiskey and bitter’s concoction they were serving up.
We ate at La Porta Verde, a good choice, on the edge of the old town and were entertained by some top-notch people watching then spent our next full day in Sanremo wandering around its pedestrian mall streets, up into winding carrugi passageways of old town. We got plenty of incline marching up and down many staircases after returning our aforementioned rental car at the not-so-easy-to-navigate-to-on-Google-maps-because-it-wants-to-take-you-down-a-treacherously-narrow-alleyway Avis. Later, we strolled the boardwalk along the beach before settling into some lounge chairs poolside at our hotel overlooking the Ligurian Sea, eating a margarita pizza and a delicious traditional cundigiun tomato, capers, tuna and onion salad. We capped it off in a little restaurant, Mille806, serving up non-traditional food, for Italy, down a little side street.
Old town Sanremo
Sanremo’s coast is known as the costa dei fiori (coast of the flowers) for its area flower growing industry. It sits only about 24 kilometers, or just under 15 miles, from France making it one of the westernmost points in the Italian riviera and, while not cheap, is a nice alternative reminiscent of much-more-popular Nice to its west in France. Our hotel had that old school charm of the early-mid 20th century, without the wear that some older hotels of that era seem to have, and felt as though Rudolph Valentino, Frank Sinatra or Sofia Loren might emerge through the doors at any point.
If you’re making your way east or west or want to check out the Ligurian coast of Italy, it’s a stop to which we would return by car or train or any other mode of transport available.
The Traveling Ridleys 
0 comments on “Old School on the Italian Riviera in Sanremo”