Notable of Sanremo and Mayor

He was born in Sanremo on 5th January 1827 to Francesco and Luigia Carlo. A member of the local notary public, in 1859 he assumed the office of mayor of Sanremo, remaining at the head of the municipal administration on various occasions until 1874.
With one of the first acts in the office of first citizen, on 9 April 1860 he sent Garibaldi a copy of the resolution, by which the City Council had awarded the general of Matuzian honorary citizenship three days earlier after the transfer of Nice, his hometown, to France.
On 16 April Corradi then expressed to Garibaldi the great satisfaction of the Municipality of Sanremo for the acceptance of the citizenship.

Among the various initiatives taken by his administration is that of setting up a new oil-powered city lighting service, inaugurated in 1865, which was then replaced by a gas-powered lighting service, which was officially activated on 1 October 1870 under the agreement signed between the Municipality of Sanremo and the Genoa concessionaire Nicolò Accini on 31 December 1869. On the basis of this agreement, the Municipal Administration granted Mr Accini the exclusive right to establish and store gas pipes under public streets and squares for lighting and heating for a period of thirty-two years until 30 September 1902. The convention with Accini, ratified by the City Council on 4 January 1870, would then be replaced by an additional convention with the company of engineer Emilio Guitton of Marseille.

During the 1960s the Corradi Administration also had to deal with two problems that would be of considerable importance in the future urban planning of the city: the location of the station and the route of the railway line. Around 1860 the project for the coastal railroad road along the Riviera di Ponente was drawn up, which was to connect the border with France to Voltri, where the tracks of the Rome-Ventimiglia line stopped. The railway company of the Ligurian coast, which was awarded the contract for the works, had foreseen that the tracks would be placed along the sea and cross the inhabited centres near the beaches. As far as the city of Sanremo was concerned, it was planned to run the rails along the course of the Marina and build the new station in the San Rocco area.

The project drawn up by the Railway Company was very well received by the citizens and the management of Sanremo, but after an initial moment of enthusiasm, they began to be convinced that it was necessary to locate the new station in the port area in order to relaunch the city.
In 1862 the political class in Matuzzo split into a "party of anti-tourists" and a "party of philoturists". The adversaries of tourism claimed that the future of Sanremo depended to a large extent on traditional agricultural and commercial activities, and therefore fought hard for the restructuring of the port and advocated the need to build the new station in the district of Pian di Nave, near the port area, tenaciously opposing the hypothesis of the passage of the tracks upstream, which would in fact have prevented the connection of the station to the port.

The promoters of tourism, instead, represented by the councillors Laura, Rambaldi, Garosci, Balestreri, Balestra, Borea, Massabò, Ansaldi and Corradi himself, affirmed that Sanremo had no chance to impose itself as an active commercial centre, nor could it hope to become rich by virtue of its agricultural production; if it did not want to remain one of the many wretched villages on the Ligurian coast, the city would have to focus everything on enhancing tourist activities, imitating the nearby French cities on the Côte d'Azur. The "philoturists" fought in particular for the passage upstream of the future railway line and made the proposal to build two stations, one to the east near the San Martino stream and one to the west near the San Bernardo stream, in order to serve what were about to become the two major tourist districts of the city.

In 1862 the City Council appointed a special commission to study in depth the question of crossing the tracks in the Sanremo urban area. The commission, accepting the requests of large sections of public opinion opposed to the "sea" crossing of the railway, presented a project that envisaged the crossing of the town "upstream", which could be achieved through the construction of two tunnels under the Berigo and San Romolo hills. Approved by the Council, this project was forwarded to the Railway Company, which, however, given its high costs, rejected it on several occasions during 1863.
After various discussions and numerous projects, the government solution to build the railway overboard exclusively through the level crossing prevailed.
After the signing of an agreement between the Municipality of Sanremo and the Ministry of Public Works in 1869, which laid down the construction methods for the line, the solemn inauguration of the new Genoa-Ventimiglia railway line took place on 25 January 1872, finally connecting the Riviera di Ponente with the major Italian and European urban centres.

In the meantime, on 18 December 1865, the Town Council decided to set up a kindergarten in Sanremo and appointed the Administrative Commission chaired by Mayor Corradi. The foundation of the kindergarten, however, encountered some difficulties because the chosen land was owned by Corradi himself, who held the positions of mayor and chairman of the Administrative Commission at the same time, creating what could be defined as a real "conflict of interest". However, the new Asylum could also be inaugurated on 28 December 1870.
 
During the Corradi Administration, a series of new regulatory plans were also approved, which radically changed the city's urban and road network.
Already in 1840, however, the municipal administration had entrusted the engineer of the Civil Engineer Francesco Verdese with the task of drawing up an urban development plan aimed at arranging the provincial road that crossed the city in the most convenient way. In 1858 the provincial engineer Innocenzo Bonfante drew up a new urban development plan in which he outlined the layout of the future streets of Mombello and Rome, and also made a proposal to build a single course connecting the San Rocco district to Corso Garibaldi. A few years later Bonfante presented a new plan, which was approved by the City Council in its meetings of 18 May and 14 June 1872.

The project provided for the completion of the course of the Marina, the widening of via Vittorio Emanuele and the construction of some streets in the direction of the sea, including via Pian di Nave, later named after Umberto I, via Principe Amedeo, via Escoffier and three other parallels which were however built after the period of validity of the plan.
During the early seventies, in the meantime, there was a break in the philoturist line-up determined by the birth of different and contrasting interests.

Around 1870 a "Levantist" party was formed, representing the landowners of the eastern part of the city led by members of the Zirio family, one of the most influential in Sanremo. The "Levantists" accused the Corradi Administration of "Ponentism", accused of excessively favouring the urbanisation of the western areas of the city, where the mayor and many notables close to him had their greatest interests.

As proof of this "Ponentist" tendency of the Town Council, the Zirio and their supporters cited the cases of the localizations, all to the west of the town, of the Empress' garden, of the promenade of Mezzogiorno, of the gardens dedicated to Queen Maria Vittoria and of the railway station, which had, among other things, determined an increase in the value of the land located in the Vallotto and Berigo regions, while to the east only the uncomfortable gas workshop had been built, which was disadvantageous for the owners of the France and Villetta regions.
The hard press campaign conducted by the "Levantisti" against the Corradi administration during the municipal elections in 1874 led to the electoral defeat of the Corradians and the departure of Corradi, which was replaced in 1874 by Count Stefano Roverizio di Roccasterone at the head of the municipality.

Corradi died in Sanremo on 21st November 1887.

(source: BIBL.: GAN, pp. 202-210; E. Costa -L. Morabito, Garibaldi cittadino di San Remo, Sanremo 1991, pp. 29-35, 104-107; M. Scattarreggia, Sanremo 1815-1915. Turismo e trasformazioni territoriali, Milano 1986, pp. ...; L. Pippione, Il Dott. Francesco Corradi insigne benefattore cittadino, in GAR, XXV (2006), n. 1, p. 7.)