We woke up to surpring news from this year’s Eurovision host country. Italy’s broadcaster Rai announced in a cheeky tweet that it would drop the names of the artists vying to win the 73rd Sanremo Festival. “It’s nice to hear ‘I love you’, but that’s nothing compared to ‘I’m ready to reveal the names of the artists competing at #Sanremo2023.”

Bello sentirsi dire “ti amo”, ma niente in confronto a “sto per comunicarvi i nomi degli artisti in gara a #Sanremo2023”

📌 Oggi al @Tg1Rai delle 13:30

— Festival di Sanremo (@SanremoRai) December 4, 2022

The winner of Sanremo will go on to represent Italy at the Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool in May 2023.

The 22 “Big” artists for Sanremo 2023 are:

• Georgia
• Articolo 31
• Elodie
• Colapesce Dimartino
• Ariete
• Moda’
• Mara Sattei
• Leo Gassmann
• I Cugini di Campagna
• Mr. Rain
• Marco Mengoni
• Anna Oxa
• Lazza
• Tananai
• Paola & Chiara
• LDA
• Gianluca Grignani
• Rosa Chemical
• Coma_Cose
• Levante
• Ultimo

The song titles will be shown during the Sanremo Giovani shows. The big announcement is that this year, the top 6 from Sanremo Giovani will join the “Big” at the Sanremo Festival, creating a show of 28 artists this February!

Running from the 7th to the 11th of February 2023, the Festival will feature some previous Sanremo contestants, including Elodie, Tananai, and Coma_Cose. There are also three previous Sanremo winners in the mix including Ana Oxa, Georgia, and Marco Mengoni (who already represented Italy at Eurovision in 2013 in Malmö). This is looking to be the most intergenerational Sanremo Festival in many years.

Finally, as always with Sanremo, while we know the artists, it won’t be possible to hear their songs until they are performed live during the Festival. This year we’ll see Amadeus and Gianni Morandi as hosts.

What do you think about today’s announcement? Can Italy take its fourth Eurovision title in Liverpool this May? Let us know below in the comments or on our socials @escbubble!

Of course Mahmood and Blanco won Sanremo 2022 with a whopping 51.77% of the overall vote in the superfinal, and went on to finish in 6th place at Eurovision on home soil in Turin. You can watch their Eurovision performance here.