In Europe, you don’t have to travel far to experience a completely different culture. If you randomly select a point in Europe outside of Russia, you’re never further than 10h by train from the nearest nation border. There are 44 countries and 24 official languages in Europe – yet, the area of Europe is just 60% of the area of the American South.

I expected Sanremo to be like some of the towns by the French Riviera I’d visited when living in Aix, only with better ravioli and friendlier people. Although I wasn’t entirely wrong, I was far from correct.

Founded in Roman times, Sanremo became a resort destination in the mid-1800s, hosting European nobility from Russia and Prussia. These days, tourism remains the primary source of economic activity, and, just like the average tourist destination by the Mediterranean, its city center is dominated by restaurants and clothing boutiques.

However, Sanremo has a few peculiarities distinguishing it from some of the similarly sized towns on the other side of the French-Italian border. For example, much of the city smells of flowers, earning it the nickname “La Città dei Fiori” (“The City of Flowers”). But the biggest differences come from observing people on the streets, the Sanremese.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the posh Sanremese wear Gucci rather than Louis Vuitton. The ladies don’t try being chic, as in some of the coastal cities in France invaded by Parisians; instead, they dress in Italian designer clothes. Some of them seem to dress to maximise the number of logos visible to passersby. Among men, beige suits aren’t as popular as in Nice. Men in Sanremo make more efforts to be macho, often wearing tracksuits or tight-fitting Armani T-shirts.

However, the rich in Sanremo don’t own the city, as they do in Monaco or Nice. Most people on the streets are perfectly normal Italians. In fact, I met some stereotypically Italian Italians: I met grannies 120 cm tall, grandpas with flat caps and pipes and men with giant calves on Bianchis.

Not only are the tourists in Sanremo fewer in number, but they are also of a different kind. On the French Riviera, most tourists come from either Britain, Germany or America. During my three-day stay, I heard almost no English or German. I heard a lot of French though – this is hardly surprising, given that everything is 20% cheaper on the Italian side of the border.

In Nice and Sanremo, the proportion of foreign residents is somewhere between 10 and 20%. While foreign residents in Nice mostly come from the former French colonies, Sanremo has a large population of Eastern Europeans. In the late 1800s, there was a particularly strong Russian community in Sanremo – one of the city’s most famous buildings is the Russian Orthodox cathedral from 1912.

Despite having a population of just 55,000, Sanremo is surprisingly diverse. It’s neither a dead rural village nor a tourist enclave like some of the French towns 50 km West. There’s a good balance between locals and non-locals, between normal and abnormal. Sanremo feels like one of those resort towns from the 1900s that’s actually wholesome.