Sanremo and Eurovision, big changes ahead. All the news announced by De Martino

Sanremo is changing face. At the presentation of the Rai schedules for the 2026-2027 season, artistic director and host Stefano De Martino officially unveiled the changes that will mark the 77th edition of the Festival, set to run from 16 to 21 February 2027. The most significant shift concerns the relationship with the Eurovision Song Contest: starting this year, the winner of the event will no longer automatically become Italy's representative at the European competition.
Friday night will in fact be entirely dedicated to selecting the artist who will head to the Eurovision Song Contest 2027, through a mechanism to be defined in detail in the coming months. "Artists will have the opportunity to stage their performance according to their own creative vision," explained De Martino. "And I think this is already a small step towards making the Festival more international."

The structure of the other nights, however, remains essentially unchanged. Tuesday 16 and Wednesday 17 February will be devoted to the competing songs, Thursday to the traditional cover-songs night, while on Saturday all the Campioni will perform their song again before the winner of the Festival is announced.
Another new development concerns the number of participants. After the thirty artists of the last edition, the line-up will be reduced. "The choice is meant to give the performances and the Festival's storytelling more room to breathe, and above all to focus more on the artists," explained De Martino, without however indicating the final number of contestants.

Also confirmed is "Sarà Sanremo," scheduled for Friday 18 December 2026. The event dedicated to young artists will be the first official milestone on the road to the Festival, and will also be the occasion to publicly unveil the line-up of Campioni taking part in Sanremo 2027.
Also speaking at the schedule presentation was Rai's CEO, Giampaolo Rossi, who summed up the event's new philosophy as follows: "The audience doesn't disappear, it changes."
Rai also announced a major international initiative set to debut in spring 2027. In partnership with the Latin Recording Academy, "Latin GRAMMY Celebra" will be launched, a series of prime-time specials dedicated to Italian music. The project will pay tribute to the great figures of Italian song and to the tracks that have left their mark on the country's musical history, featuring performances by Italian and international artists selected together with the Latin Recording Academy. The specials, produced by Rai's Prime Time Entertainment division in collaboration with Fremantle, will celebrate the contribution of Italian music and its influence on the global cultural landscape.

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