Ventimiglia is the westernmost town on the Italian Riviera — so close to France that its train station is the last stop before the border, and the cross-border French influence is felt everywhere, from the shops selling to French day-trippers to the bilingual street signs and the boulangeries on the main street. It sits at the mouth of the Roja river, between the limestone cliffs of the coast and the steep inland valleys that climb up into the Ligurian Alps.
The town has two distinct parts. The old town (Centro Storico) climbs a hill above the river, a tangle of stepped medieval lanes, Romanesque churches and crumbling palaces. It is quiet, untouristy, and feels genuinely lived-in — a pleasant half-day wander. The new town on the flat ground east of the river is where the train station, the shops and the long, well-used pebble beach are. Every Friday the town hosts one of the largest open-air markets in Italy — a vast sprawl of stalls selling clothes, leather, cheese and local produce that draws bargain-hunting French visitors from the entire Côte d'Azur and turns Ventimiglia for the day into one of the busiest places on the Italian coast.
Just outside the town, two sites are genuinely worth a detour. The Balzi Rossi Caves — "red cliffs" — at the French border are a cluster of prehistoric caves where Palaeolithic humans left some of the most remarkable art and burials in Europe, including the "Balzi Rossi Venus" figurines; a small site museum displays the finds. The famous Hanbury Botanical Gardens at Capo Mortola, a 19th-century English garden created on a cliff above the sea by the tea merchant Sir Thomas Hanbury, hold one of the finest collections of Mediterranean and subtropical plants in Europe. Ventimiglia is also a useful base for excursions into the hinterland villages of the Roja valley (by the narrow-gauge Cuneo–Ventimiglia railway) and, across the border, into Monaco, Menton and the rest of the French Riviera.