Why You Should Visit Ventimiglia, Italy

I literally stumbled upon Ventimiglia, Liguria, Italy in the Italian Riviera while on my way to Nice, France. Unfortunately unbeknownst to me the French trains were on strike. The very last train stop in Italy before France is Ventimiglia. At first with my limited Italian I thought the train conductor was saying something about twenty million something rather. Then a man from the Netherlands who spoke perfect English explained to my friend and I that Ventimiglia was the name of the town the train ride was going to end at. From there we were on our own. Flabbergasted we didn't know what to do. 

Sometime around 6am our train pulled into a really run-down dirty looking station. Figured we had to get stuck in the dumpiest looking place. The train station had many buses that were going to Nice or Monaco, but none of them could guarantee us a ride back. We sat on the steps of the train station looking down a street that had some shops. It reminded me of Romania, or maybe a little beach town in Florida. There were some palm trees and really nice yellow and orange stucco buildings. We looked on a map and saw the Monaco was only 7 miles away. Perhaps we could walk there. It was just over a mountain.
We walked down the street and began to realize the town was really quaint and beautiful. The sun was shining and the streets were rather crowded with people going into restaurants and into little shops. There was a long boardwalk that took us along a rocky lido, or beach, typical of the Riviera and unlike anything I had ever seen. The boardwalk began to get very hilly and then it disappeared. A path continued to lead us up a hill amongst ruins of old buildings. The path got really steep and we decided that maybe walking to Monaco was ridiculous. However, we had just seen some ancient ruins. Ventimiglia we later discovered has many ancient ruins of the city walls, tombs, and even an old Roman theatre. My guess is that we discovered the city walls, or perhaps old tombs. It resisted the Romans for many years, but was seized about 100 years BC, then later by Byzantines, Goths, and eventually by Genoese.