Ospedaletti

According to tradition, this fishing town situated between Capo Nero and Capo Sant'Ampelio takes its name from the hospice founded for pilgrims in the fourteenth century by the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem. The most temperate town in Italy discovered its vocation for tourism and for flower-growing (especially carnations and roses) in the second half of the nineteenth century with the arrival of the first "tourists" (including Katherine Mansfield and Mary Shelley) and the opening of the first flower market in Europe.



Ospedaletti has good road links with Ventimiglia, the Cote d'Azur and the Riviera dei Fiori and was, at the beginning of the twentieth century, a popular resort with the mid-European aristocracy and international élite, whose favourite meeting place, Villa Sultana, is where the first casino in Italy was opened in 1911. The race track was built in 1947 to Formula One standards: it is 3380 metres long and attracted some of the most famous racing drivers in the 1950s and 1960s.



The church of the Porrini was built in the mid-sixteenth century and made into a sanctuary in 1858, although the present Greek-cross form, like the decorations on the façade of the adjacent pilgrims' hospice, are in Baroque style.

The little thirteenth-century church bearing the name of Sant'Erasmo, the patron saint of sailors, preserves a collection of sailors' votary objects. The eighteenth-century parish church of San Giovanni Battista holds a copy by Tommaso Rossi of Raphael's Madonna di Foligno.



Two sixteenth-century towers are all that can still be seen of the ancient defence system: one is a watchtower overlooking the bay and the other is a quadrangular defence tower.



There are plenty of panoramic walks to be made among the flowers, palms and eucalyptus trees in the local gardens and along the ancient mule tracks in the higher woodland areas.