Sanremo as a Venue: Why Festival Week Has Become a Playground for Brands

The 2027 Sanremo Music Festival will be held from February 16–20, the 77th edition of the festival, hosted by Stefano De Martino. For years now, however, the Festival has been more than just a singing competition watched on TV: it’s the week when all of Italy turns its attention to a single city, and brands know this all too well.

In the latest edition, the main partners came from sectors far removed from music: insurance, transportation, energy, retail, and home care. Eurospin has combined retail and entertainment with a store preceded by a karaoke area, Air Wick has set up a multisensory space dedicated to fragrances, General Information brought his “Balconcino narrativo” to the city, along with a podcast series, Rowenta signed a Ferris wheel and L'Oréal Paris has transformed an entire space in Piazza Borea d’Olmo into a Beauty Bar that has become a social club. None of these brands sell records. All of them, however, have realized that in Sanremo, the brand visibility It's built off the stage, not on top of it.

A City That Becomes a Stage

Credit is also due to projects like “Tra palco e città,” the regional marketing initiative that takes the Festival far beyond the walls of the Ariston Theater: talks, showcases, parties, product presentations, and hospitality events enliven the city for an entire week, multiplying opportunities for interaction between brands and an in-person audience, in addition to those following everything online.

This is where the real work of location scouting: Finding the right space means understanding not only what a place conveys, but also what it allows you to do—setups, crowd flow, technical timelines, permits, and safety.

Unusual locations are the real playground

Anyone familiar with Sanremo knows that the most searched-for locations during Festival week are rarely villas or historic homes. They are bars, tobacco shops, bakeries, and newsstands: unusual locations which, for a few days, completely change their appearance and function. In the latest edition, Pringles opened his AperiHouse inside an aperitif bar in the city center; Novi Cream placed a vintage, branded truck along one of the main streets; Jack Daniel’s, in collaboration with Superluna, has transformed 500 square meters in Portosole into a space where the stage and backstage blend together; a historic bakery in the city center—a go-to spot for the local sardenaira—remained one of the week’s informal hotspots, just a stone’s throw from Piazza Bresca, the heart of Sanremo’s nightlife. The same goes for neighborhood tobacco shops and newsstands, which during the Festival become makeshift distribution points for merchandise, photo spots, or simple urban backdrops for social media content: modest locations, yet with enormous visibility in a city where every corner, for one week, is photographed and documented.

It’s exactly the kind of location we feature: spaces that, in everyday life, are a bar, a store, or a warehouse, and that during Festival week become pop-up stores, guest lounges, and backdrops for social media content.

How Ask4Location Works in Sanremo

We are building, location by location, a archive dedicated to Sanremo on our website, featuring the most interesting venues we’ve discovered around the city—all of which are currently unconventional spaces, perfectly in line with what the Festival week truly calls for. You can find it here: Sanremo Location Archive.

But an online archive, no matter how well-curated, tells only part of the story. Understanding Sanremo means knowing how to navigate permits, tight deadlines, and complicated access during the city’s busiest week of the year. That’s why, if you’re already thinking about how to position your brand during the upcoming Festival, the most useful advice we can give you is: Tell us about your project, so we can help you create the right event, in the right location, with everything you need to make it a real success.