Another "historical" chapter of the Sanremo hotel industry.

It was one of the first four modern hotels built in the city in the first sixty years of the 19th century.

But it was born from the transformation of the old eighteenth century hotel De la Palme, mentioned by Garibaldi and Ruffini.

When the King of Sardinia Vittorio Emanuele II arrived in the town on 29 January 1857, his sons, princes Umberto, Amedeo and Oddone, stayed in the then prestigious hotel during their brief stay in Sanremo, a hotel already famous for hosting Garibaldi nine years earlier.

It was located in Piazza Colombo in what is today the Hotel Globo. It had about thirty rooms: Giovanni Domenico Ruffini himself recommended it to business travellers.

The same hotel, in one of his advertisements in 1897, recommended it to cyclists who, at that time, were the most avid tourists.

 The hotel maintained the name of Grande Bretagne for a long time.

It was a point of reference especially for the passing clientele rather than for permanent tourists. Piazza Colombo was then, perhaps even more so than today, the nerve centre of the city, where the public services to Taggia ended and the stagecoach stops between Genoa and Nice were located.

(source: Una Stagione lunga cent'anni lunga, by Bruno Monticone; archive images)