A spring trip to Alassio could also take in Flauer (4-6 April in 2025), the town’s festival of cooking with flowers, this year with invited Sicilian chefs widening the offering of stalls, tastings and guided hikes.
Inland are the narrow streets of the old town, called Il Budello (the gut), where the Old Alassio Association keeps photographs dating from before the British “discovered” it.
But neither has Alassio great appeal to more ordinary Britons wanting a summer holiday: August temperatures can hit the high 30s, crowds and prices surge and, as in so many Italian resorts, the sands are taken over by beach concessions from Easter to September.
Just over an hour from Genoa (not much more from Nice), this lucky little town faces south-east over the Ligurian Sea, protected by a ring of hills on a shallow curve of silvery sand called Baia del Sole (Sunshine Bay).
An image taken in 1860 shows Alassio a mere fishing village, with just sheep and a few drying nets on the unspoilt sand.
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