5 Nights of the Sanremo Music Festival: A Traveler's Guide to Italy's Biggest Music Week

What Is the Sanremo Music Festival?

Officially the Festival della canzone italiana, the Sanremo Music Festival is Italy's premier televised song competition, organized and broadcast by RAI. Competing songs must be new, performed in Italian or a regional language, and judged through a mix of press jury, radio jury, and public televote. It also holds a well-documented record: the festival is the longest continuously running annual TV song contest in the world, a title it has kept since its first edition in 1951. Sanremo itself carries the nickname City of Flowers and Song, tied to the dialectal pronunciation of patron saint San Romolo. Since 1956, the festival has doubled as Italy's main pathway to the Eurovision Song Contest, and the winning act typically receives the right of first refusal to represent Italy that year. That pipeline has stayed visible internationally, with the festival's launch effect carrying acts from Domenico Modugno to Måneskin toward much bigger stages.

Why Sanremo Is More Than a Song Contest

Host Pippo Baudo set a record that still stands, presenting thirteen editions between 1968 and 2008, and Mike Bongiorno's eleven editions are memorialized with a statue in the town center. Politics has surfaced on the Ariston stage more than once. In 1984, Baudo invited a group of striking steelworkers on air to make their case directly to the national audience. A decade later, in 1995, a man climbed onto the theater's balustrade during the live broadcast and threatened to jump; Baudo left the stage, talked him down, and returned to a crowd chanting his name. Moments like those are why Italians describe the week with a catchphrase drawn from the festival's own 1995 and 1996 opening themes, Perché Sanremo è Sanremo, or Because Sanremo Is Sanremo. Sanremo's cultural footprint even reaches board games: since 2010, the town has been one of the featured cities in the special Monopoly Italia edition.

The 5 Nights of the Sanremo Music Festival, Night by Night

Every edition of the Sanremo Music Festival runs five consecutive nights, Tuesday through Saturday, in late February at the Teatro Ariston. Competitors reach the lineup either as an established Big Artist entry or through the Nuove Proposte newcomers category, itself fed by the Sanremo Giovani and Area Sanremo pre-selections. Here is what typically happens each night.

• Tuesday: Opening Night
  • The full field of Big Artists debuts, each performing a new song for the first time in front of the press jury, radio jury, and TV audience.
  • Hosts and the artistic director set the tone for the week, and scoring begins even though no one is eliminated yet.
• Wednesday: Second Night and the Newcomers
  • The remaining Big Artists perform, and the Nuove Proposte category takes its turn competing for best new discovery.
  • This is often the first night casual viewers tune in specifically to see which new act stands out.
• Thursday: Third Night
  • All Big Artists perform again, giving juries and the public a fuller picture before scores start to separate the field.
  • Musical guest segments and interviews typically run longer as competitive tension builds toward the weekend.
• Friday: Cover Night
  • Competing artists set aside their own songs to perform covers and duets, often paired with guest musicians from outside the competition.
  • Many fans call this the most purely entertaining night, since it trades competitive tension for nostalgia.
• Saturday: The Final
  • Every remaining Big Artist performs once more before combined televote, press jury, and radio jury results crown a winner.
  • The winning act typically earns the right of first refusal to represent Italy at the Eurovision Song Contest that year.

When Is the Next Sanremo Music Festival?

The most recent edition ran 24 to 28 February 2026, hosted by artistic director Carlo Conti alongside singer Laura Pausini. Sal Da Vinci won the Big Artists section with Per sempre sì, and Nicolò Filippucci topped the Newcomers category with Laguna. For the next cycle, RAI confirmed a change of leadership: Stefano De Martino takes over as artistic director and host, with the announcement made through his own social channels on 6 June 2026. Festival-focused travel sites report the new dates as 16 to 20 February 2027, matching the fixed Tuesday-to-Saturday, late-February pattern. Treat the 2027 dates as confirmed by the organiser rather than a rough estimate, since they came directly from the incoming host's own announcement.

Getting Into Teatro Ariston: The Ticket Reality

Seats inside the Teatro Ariston for the five February nights are among the hardest tickets in Italian television. RAI sells them through its own portal, sanremo.rai.it, and access typically runs through an application window or lottery rather than an open sale. Demand outstrips the theater's capacity by a wide margin every year, so a straightforward advance purchase is rarely possible. Some Sanremo-focused travel agencies sell hospitality packages that bundle an Ariston seat with a nearby hotel stay, and those packages sit at the high end of the festival's cost range, with per-person costs commonly starting around a few hundred euros and climbing past €1,000 for prime packages. Treat any third-party ticket listing with caution during festival week, since resale prices surge as the dates approach. If a guaranteed seat matters more than budget, start with the official RAI portal first and treat agency packages as a fallback, not the default plan.

How to Get to Sanremo

Sanremo has no airport of its own, so most international visitors fly into Nice Côte d'Azur Airport (NCE) just across the French border, or Genoa Airport (GOA) up the Ligurian coast. From either city, the coastal Ventimiglia railway line runs along the Riviera and stops in Sanremo, making a rental car optional rather than essential. Book train tickets and any airport transfer well before festival week starts, since regional trains fill up with press, staff, and fans moving along the same line. Drivers should expect limited parking within Sanremo's town center during the five festival nights, given road closures and a tightened security perimeter near the Ariston.

Where to Stay: Sanremo vs. the Riviera

Rooms right in Sanremo book out fastest and cost the most, since RAI, sponsors, and international press lock in the best hotels years ahead of each edition. Most independent travelers end up basing themselves outside town instead, trading a short train ride for better availability and lower rates.

• Hotel Londra and Hotel Royal, both close to the Ariston, host much of the festival's celebrity-spotting foot traffic, but RAI, sponsors, and press typically book them out years in advance.
• Bordighera, a short ride down the coastal rail line, is the most common overflow base once Sanremo itself is full.
• Ospedaletti and Arma di Taggia offer a quieter, lower-demand alternative with an easy train connection back into town.
• Menton, just across the French border, works as a day-trip base for travelers who would rather skip the festival-week price surge entirely.

How to Experience Sanremo Without an Ariston Ticket

A ticket is not required to feel the festival. Sanremo effectively turns into a free, public event around the theater, and most visitors experience the week from the street rather than a seat inside. Crowds gather along Corso Matteotti and around the Ariston entrance each evening to watch performers arrive for the red carpet before showtime. Casa Sanremo, the festival's press and hospitality hub, runs out of the Palafiori and hosts interviews, side events, and public-facing programming throughout the week. Public screens broadcast the show live in the square outside, and local radio runs its own coverage from an open-air stage as part of the pre-show PrimaFestival segment.

Festival History: Awards, Venues, and Legendary Winners

The festival's first edition ran from 29 to 31 January 1951 inside the Sanremo Casino, with only three performers, Nilla Pizzi, Achille Togliani, and the Duo Fasano, splitting 20 songs between them. Casino stayed the venue through 1976; the Teatro Ariston took over in 1977 and has hosted almost every edition since, aside from 1990, when the newly built Palafiori stood in its place. Domenico Modugno's 1958 win with Nel blu dipinto di blu, better known as Volare, became the song most identified with the festival's mid-century identity and helped popularize a lighter, more modern Italian pop sound. Not every chapter has been celebratory: in 1967, singer Luigi Tenco was found dead in the Hotel Savoy the night after failing to reach the final, a tragedy still referenced in festival retrospectives. Critics' Award recognition started in 1982 as a press-created prize for Mia Martini's song, then took her name in 1996, the year she died. Liguria's own acts have won the festival six times, most recently Olly in 2025 with Balorda nostalgia, following earlier home-turf wins by Matia Bazar, Toto Cutugno, Ricchi e Poveri, and Alexia. More recently, the festival's launch effect has carried acts like Måneskin toward international careers, following a lineage that also includes Laura Pausini, Eros Ramazzotti, Andrea Bocelli, and Giorgia.

Mistakes to Avoid During Festival Week

A few planning mistakes come up again and again for first-time visitors.

• Booking transport too late: regional trains on the coastal line fill with press, staff, and fans well before opening night, so lock in seats early.
• Expecting a quiet Riviera week: Sanremo's usual off-season calm disappears the moment the festival starts, with crowds, security, and road closures reshaping the town center.
• Skipping the local food scene: sardenaira, Sanremo's onion-and-anchovy flatbread, and baci di Sanremo, the town's almond-and-chocolate confection, are worth seeking out between shows.
• Assuming an Ariston ticket is the only way in: the street-level festival around Casa Sanremo and the public screens is free and, for many visitors, the better experience.

Beyond the Music: Extending Your Trip in Liguria

Sanremo rewards a trip longer than just festival week. Hanbury Botanical Gardens make an easy half-day trip along the coast, and Bussana Vecchia, a medieval hillside village known today for its resident artists, sits inland as a quieter contrast to festival-week Sanremo. Travelers comparing Italy's biggest cultural weeks often put Sanremo alongside two other heavyweight events. The Venice Film Festival: A Traveler's Guide to Tickets, the Lido, and Red Carpet Access draws a similar international press crowd each autumn, with its own version of the accommodation crunch Sanremo visitors face in February. The Lucca Comics & Games: The Complete Guide to Europe's Biggest Comics Festival weekend poses the same lodging squeeze farther east in Tuscany, and travelers who have already learned to book rooms early for that event tend to apply the same discipline here.