Giardini Regina Elena & Corso Imperatrice
Sanremo's palm-lined seafront promenade, Corso Imperatrice, and the adjacent Giardini Regina Elena are among the most elegant public gardens on the Italian Riviera — a kilometre-long ribbon of century-old Canary Island palms, exotic succulents and Art Nouveau kiosks that feels like a living museum of the resort's Edwardian heyday.
A Garden Designed for Wintering Aristocrats
The gardens were laid out in the 1870s to attract the European aristocracy who wintered in Sanremo — Empress Maria Alexandrovna of Russia was among the most famous regulars, and the promenade was renamed in her honour. The Russian Orthodox Church of Cristo Salvatore (1913), with its five onion domes, still stands at the western end of the gardens as a reminder of that cosmopolitan winter-colony era.
The planting is genuinely subtropical: dragon trees, agave, Canary Island date palms and a magnificent specimen of a Jubaea chilensis — Chilean wine palm — that is over 150 years old and one of the largest in Europe. A botanical information board near the main entrance names the key specimens.
The Promenade Walk and What Lies Along It
The full corso runs from the old port area west to the casino and beyond, and the flat, wide path is equally popular with elderly Sanremesi doing their passeggiata and cyclists using it as an extension of the Pista Ciclabile. Early morning is the best time — the light is golden, the palms cast long shadows and the sea is often glassy.
Look out for the wrought-iron Art Nouveau bandstand near the central stretch, which hosts free Sunday-morning concerts in summer. The seafront bars along the corso serve excellent cappuccino and cornetti from around 7 am, and the best of them put tables directly under the palms.
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