We get off the train about twenty kilometers before the French border. Sanremo has dug its train station into the hill, so we reach the exit through pedestrian underpasses only after several minutes of walking. The afternoon glare does not allow us to clearly see the world around us. The hotel is located a ten-minute walk from the station. A beautiful, old building, in the shade of pine and palm trees, with creaky floors. We settle into a shady room in the attic.
We don't hesitate long. Sanremo is calling us. We reach Columbus Square via Garibaldi Corso. Here we have to decide whether to go straight up, into the old town alleys, or first, parallel to the coast, through the pedestrian zone. We go straight, along Matteoti Street, which surprises us with its elegance and the scale of the buildings – they are the size of the buildings in Knez Mihailova; although the town has only about fifty thousand inhabitants. After a fifteen-minute walk, we arrive in front of the most famous building in Sanremo – the Casino.
Although the resorts between France and Italy built their elite casinos for idle aristocrats and millionaires, this casino is more famous than the others for something. This is where the story of the Italian Canzone Festival began in 1951. In our country, the name Sanremo Festival has become established. It was this competition, with its influence and splendor, that served as the model for the Eurovision Song Contest.
Domenico Modunjo has been gone since 1994, but his festival hit and winning song from 1958 – Volare – is still listened to by the great-grandchildren of his original fans. The same goes for the songs of Adriano Celentano.
There were also tragic events. Luigi Tenko was 29 years old and sang at Sanremo in 1964. His song did not make it to the final. Tenko locked himself in his room at the Savoy Hotel and wrote the following lines: "I loved the Italian audience and meaninglessly sacrificed five years of my life to them. I do not do this because I am fed up with life (quite the opposite!), but as an act of protest..." The protest was directed against both the audience and the jury who favored other songs. But the act was drastic. Luigi Tenko shot himself in the head.
We return through the pedestrian zone. For those who associate the Festival with names such as Umberto Toci, Toto Cutunjo or Eros Ramacoti, it is worth noting that since 1977 the stage on which they won was the one at the Ariston Theatre, where the Festival moved.
This legendary place is bustling with life. We are already thinking about sitting down in a café or restaurant. The internet leads us to the side street of Via Gaudio, which runs down to the coast. Bistro Marcio turned out to be a lucky choice. There was no room, but the owner, with a smile, brought us a table out onto the street, extending his garden. I remember that the same procedure delighted us at the other end of this vast basin called the Mediterranean – in Izmir. With grappa, fish meze and cheese, we look at the alley that reminds me a bit of the “eater’s alley” in Brussels. Table after table, restaurant after restaurant, in a seemingly endless series.
WATER ON ROPES
When we had refreshed ourselves, sorted out our impressions, and through conversation had processed the confusion caused by the onslaught of such Italian beauty, we set off down Via Gaudio. Its lower part is even more densely planted with gastronomic sensations. The street becomes a veritable hive. And it all ends with a beautiful square that, like a funnel, absorbs all those people who were not sucked in by the pipe of the alley.
Bresca Square is the old antique heart of Sanremo. Close to the harbor, framed by Art Nouveau buildings, full of restaurants, walkers, languages that intertwine and overlap. It is named after the captain and experienced sailor Benedetto Bresca, a scion of an old city family. Some sources also call him Giacomo. And his story goes like this: when Bresca was fifty-six years old, he found himself in Rome, in St. Peter's Square. In 1586, Pope Sixtus V was firmly rebuilding Rome, which had been in chaos before him. He ordered the obelisk, which the Roman emperor Caligula had brought from Egypt, to be erected in the square. The obelisk weighed 300 tons and was 25 meters high. The Pope threatened the gathered crowd - anyone who whistled while the ropes were lifting the obelisk would be punished with death. The ropes became red-hot during the lifting. Disaster threatened - the ropes would break and the obelisk would fall. As an experienced sea wolf, Breska recognized the danger and roared in the dead silence: "Aiga ae corde" – water on the ropes! They obeyed him and the accident was avoided. The Pope did not punish him for breaking the silence, but rewarded him. He chose the award himself. He decided that he should be the one to send palm trees to Rome from Sanremo every year for Easter.
And here, near the harbor, there are plenty of slender, shaggy palm trees. We cross the street and we're already in the harbor. The network of ropes from the masts of yachts dances before our eyes. Twilight gets involved in that swaying. The smell of fish caresses our nostrils. I'm sorry we've already eaten.
A barge with the apt name Friđitorija is clearly the most attractive spot in the area. People wait patiently for the fish to jump out of the deep oil and onto their paper plates. We promise ourselves to stop by tomorrow, if we manage to stay hungry.
On the way back to the hotel, we see that the night sky above Sanremo takes on the color of indigo, beneath which the town, which is actually just waking up, sparkles with thousands of sequins.
PINJA ON THE BRIDGE
The next morning after breakfast we immediately set off up the old town streets. This medieval core of the city is called Pinja. Dictionaries say it is – a cone. Pinja was created out of the need to defend against Arab pirates. The houses on the hillside were built one above the other and when in times of trouble the streets were blocked with everything and anything, the city, like a hedgehog, turned into a place too painful to conquer and plunder.
We pass through the arched city gates, randomly choosing alleys. Scenes emerge before us that are immediately imprinted somewhere in the inner vault of images. Sanremo. The name engraved on the glass of the lamp radio from childhood began to glow with unexpected colors.
It's hot, but we don't give up. We climb all the way to the church on the top of the old town. Then we sit on a bench to rest and look around. We see the maze of streets. We hear the curses of a man carrying some lumber downhill. The low conversation of another couple of tourists. Then everything goes quiet again.
Below, in the shadow of the city walls, is a restaurant with checkered tablecloths, where tonight we will drink wine and listen to the whispers of the walls, sensing the untold stories of the locals.
Pinja is self-sufficient. It doesn't care about the luxury and fame on the coast, or the rich guests in the casino. Here, the city has jealously embraced another time and won't let it pass.
SHADOW OF MONTENEGRIN melancholy
The Russian Orthodox Church in Sanremo is actually officially called the Church of Christ the Savior, the Great Martyr Catherine and the Venerable Seraphim of Sarov. It was built in 1912 near the Casino, and its splendor speaks of the size and strength of the Russian tourist community that spent the winter months on this coast. Maria Alexandrovna, daughter of the Russian Tsar Alexander, was also a temporary resident of Sanremo. The Grand Duchess was also the patron of the construction of this church.
The church itself was modeled after typical Moscow sacral buildings from the 17th century. Five domes, three altars, everything testified to the fact that the founding hand that holds the church is the hand of the Romanovs. It was built according to the design of the architect Alexei Shchusev. It is decorated with stone carvings.
During World War II, the church was hit by a bomb that pierced the dome and lodged in the floor – but did not explode. Over the decades, this place of worship has been visited by numerous Russian dignitaries, but one of the stories associated with this place leads to Montenegro.
I peek through the gate in the port. There are busts of the Italian royal couple. I'm not so interested in the last Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III, but in the figure next to him – the Queen of Italy and Albania, the Empress of Ethiopia, the goddaughter of the Russian Tsar, the daughter of King Nicholas, whom our sources will call Elena of Savoy.
Her father, King Nikola, died in 1921, about eighty kilometers from here, in French exile. Her mother Milena died two years later. They were buried in the crypt of this church. Their remains were transferred to Cetinje in 1989.
I remember that the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed VI, died here, in exile, in 1926, having outlived his empire by only four years.
The long shadow of historical melancholy, the subdued glow of dynasties that come and go, unexpectedly touches us here, in the middle of a fashionable Italian resort near the French border.
PARTISAN ITALIAN CALVIN
In the town we came across a memorial plaque that said that Italo Calvino, "an honorable citizen and a precocious, productive writer ranging from realism to fairy tales, attended Cassini's high school here. He gave the people of Sanremo an incomparable literary profile, gaining great fame in Italy and the world."
Sometimes we can't remember the birthplace of the authors of the books we read, or we're not interested in that information, written in afterwords and on covers. One of the significant books of the eighties that he signed was "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler..." Here, Calvino expertly played with writing, readers, and genres:
You start reading a new novel by Italo Calvino If one winter night a traveler. Relax. Collect yourself. Cast aside every other thought. Let the world around you fade into obscurity. It's best to close the door; the television is always on behind it. Tell them right away: "No, I don't want to watch television." Raise your voice, if they can't hear you: "I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they couldn't even hear you with all the noise out there; say it louder, shout: "I'm starting to read a new novel by Italo Calvino!" Or, if you don't want to, don't say it, let's hope they leave you alone.
If anyone thinks that there is too much literature in the description of the city, let them remember the fact that Sanremo would not be what it is if a certain Giovanni Domenico Ruffini, a writer from Genoa, had not written the novel Doctor Antonio, about the love of an Italian revolutionary and an English noblewoman. The novel was translated into English and published in Edinburgh in 1855. This caused a real craze among British tourists for the Ligurian coast. And Giovanni then spiced up his success with the text “Sanremo Revisited” in which he praises the luxury of the local hotels. The power of words should not be underestimated.
In a nearby square, right next to the monument to the first mayor of Sanremo, Carli, we sat in the garden of a cafe. For ten euros, we got a cocktail and a meze. We stayed there for a while.
I was thinking about Calvin, who was one of my literary advisors in the mythical eighties. Faced with the memorial plaque, I try to connect what I carried within me as an impression of the writer, with his upbringing in Sanremo. With his childhood under fascism in a liberal parental home. His hiding from the fascist mobilization, followed by his departure to the Garibaldi partisan detachment.
I remember seeing a monument down in the harbor dedicated to the partisan struggle of the local population. I didn't know that Kalvino was with them in the most difficult places.
The monument was unveiled in 1972, and city chronicles say that 7 people were present, including delegations from Italian, French, and Yugoslav partisan associations.
The sculpture "Monument to the Martyrs of the Resistance" depicts a man tied to a tree while awaiting execution. The author is the artist Renco Orvieto. He was born and died in Sanremo, and was himself a member of the armed resistance movement against fascism.
The surrounding park next to the coastal fortress is also named Vittorio Gugliemo Vito after the legendary partisan commander Vito, who fought in Spain, Greece and Liguria. He was Italo Calvino's war commander and later the model for his main character in the first part of his prose: "The Path to the Spider's Nests". In it, Calvino described the difficult battles in the hills of Liguria.
I remember that as a young writer, his mentor and friend was Cesare Pavese, another great Italian writer. Calvino's involvement in the Italian Communist Party, his distancing from Stalinism, his collection of Italian fairy tales that has been in every Italian household since the 1985s, made him one of Italy's most famous writers. But in XNUMX, just as he was finishing his sixth lecture on literature – he was supposed to give them at Harvard that year – he suffered a devastating stroke. The lectures were published posthumously in America. They became bestsellers. I didn't read them. And I regret it. Here in beautiful Sanremo, it's as if I've accidentally stumbled upon the grave of a friend. Goodbye, Italo!
GOODBYE BONĐORNO
We walk along the pedestrian zone towards the bus station. I list to myself everything I haven't visited. Not one of the hundreds of villas where emperors and bourgeois spent their time. Not even the villa of Alfred Nobel, the man who gave the world dynamite and the prize for scientific and spiritual achievements, and who died here, in Sanremo. And much more.
There's always a hint of sadness when you leave a place that has gotten under your skin in such a short time. Sanremo is a place where life could be beautiful. As if reading my mind, Mike Bongiorno waves to me from a side street. Actually, his statue.
Bongiorno was a famous television name. The son of a Sicilian emigrant to America, he returned to his father's country in time to participate in the launch of a television program. His shows, especially the quiz, made Bongiorno the most famous face in Italy. But what is his connection to Sanremo? True, he was also a partisan as a young man, and then a German camp. But not in this part of Italy. Mike Bongiorno hosted the Sanremo festival for eleven consecutive years from 1963, when this canzone music festival became a cult worldwide. Bongiorno has not been with us since 2009, but here he waves to us petrified, as we leave a place that a few days ago was just a promising unknown, and is now one of the most brilliant pearls in the string of our travels along the Mediterranean coast.
Bonus video:
