Sanremo Music Festival is blander than ever. Italians deserve more spice
One Italian newspaper calls it Italy’s Super Bowl. A more accurate description for Sanremo Music Festival might be a cross between Eurovision and New York’s Met Gala – albeit a more insular version. Regardless, Italians are glued to their screens for five days each February as they watch musicians most of the world has never heard of competing to be crowned king or queen on the song contest’s final night, which takes place tomorrow.
This glitzy, establishment event held in the Teatro Ariston in coastal Liguria is set-piece Italia: a reassuring mainstay that helps viewers beat the last of the winter blues with spring on the doorstep. Now in its 76th edition and broadcast on the Rai state network from 20.40 until well after 01.00, the media furiously unpicks the previous night’s shenanigans (including, this year, a bizarre attempt to use AI that saw audience members briefly turned into yellow ducks). But beyond new gimmicks, ratings (or “lo share” in Italian) are what matter most to the network.
And yet this year has been blander and more boring than ever. Everything about the programming is nostalgic and retrograde, from the graphics to the songs themselves. Il Foglio newspaper has called the song competition representative of a “calm and melancholy Italy” with “songs that seem to be written in a temporal limbo.” And it’s hard to disagree. Who better to host it, then, than the vanilla, housewives’ favourite Carlo Conti (pictured above) – back for a second year – his perma-tan somehow an even deeper shade of mahogany in 2026.
This is exactly how the government wants the festival to unfold. After rumours circulated that far-right prime minister Giorgia Meloni would attend, she took to social media to rebuff the suggestion. “And I’m sure Sanremo will shine without imaginary guests,” she added. “Because it’s the greatest celebration of Italian music – and there’s no need to force political controversy into it.”
Much as the government might want political controversy to be absent from the show, it rarely is. Meloni’s words were a thinly cloaked attack on previous editions under the artistic direction of Amadeus. He had attempted to shake things up by making the show more diverse and more representative of contemporary Italy. That led to several on-air controversies, including rapper Ghali, who is of Tunisian origin, calling to “stop the genocide” on the 2024 edition, a reference to the war in Gaza. His apparent snubbing at this month’s Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony in Milan (his performance was never given a camera close-up and RAI commentators didn’t name-check him) was seen by some as a reprisal for his Sanremo statement.
The sanitised 2026 edition might be stripped of satire and spice but even vanilla Conti has managed to court a smidgen of controversy. This year he invited comic Andrea Pucci to co-host the third night, seemingly brushing over accusations of stereotypical and homophobic tropes in his jokes. After a backlash, Pucci pulled out – but not before being defended by Meloni, suddenly happy to talk politics. “The illiberal drift of the left in Italy is becoming frightening,” she said.
And that’s as juicy as it gets. From feting celebrity bad boys made good (Achille Lauro) to celebrating family values through the appearance of Olympic-medal winners (speed skater Francesca Lollobrigida got a big round of applause when she mentioned her son), Sanremo has been a snore fest. And it even seems to be affecting “lo share”. This year’s second night had a little over nine million viewers and 59.5 per cent of the viewing audience, compared to 11.8 million people (a 64.6 per cent share) at the same juncture last year. Italians could do with a little more spice.
Ed Stocker is Monocle’s Europe editor at large.
