The 2010 Rallye Sanremo (52º Rallye Sanremo), was the 10th round of the 2010 Intercontinental Rally Challenge (IRC) season and was also an round of the Italian Rally Championship. The eleven stage asphalt rally took place on 23 – 25 September 2010. The longest stage of the rally, Ronde, was run in darkness. All other stages were run in daylight.

The rally took place in the province of Imperia, with a total length of 465.63 km (289.33 mi) of which 220.03 km (136.72 mi) were special stages. The rally base was located along the sea front and the old railway station in the heart of the town of Sanremo. A record breaking entry of 30 S2000 cars contested the last all-asphalt IRC event of the year. In addition to the top six runners in the IRC, Proton entered three-time Sanremo winner Gilles Panizzi to partner alongside Niall McShea.

Paolo Andreucci became the seventh victor of an IRC rally in 2010, after holding off Juho Hänninen by just 4.4 seconds, with Freddy Loix just edging out Kris Meeke for the final podium position with a stage-winning time on the final stage. Meeke had held the lead of the rally for the first three of the rally's eleven stages before Andreucci claimed the rally lead through the Apricale test. Abarth's Giandomenico Basso led the rally at the end of day one, setting a time some fifteen seconds quicker than his rivals on the night-time Ronde test of 44 kilometres. Basso would eventually slip to seventh in the final classification. Hänninen cut into Andreucci's lead on day two, with the championship leader falling narrowly short of Andreucci, who claimed his first victory in the IRC. Hänninen's second place allowed him to advance two points in the championship standings due to an improvement on dropped scores, while rival Jan Kopecký could do no better than sixth, and thus failing to improve his points total.

Rallye Sanremo is a rally competition held in Sanremo, Italy. Except for the 1995 event, the event was part of the FIA World Rally Championship schedule from the 1973 season to the 2003 season. Currently, it is a round of the Intercontinental Rally Challenge and the Italian national rally championship.

The first "Rallye Internazionale di Sanremo" was held in 1928. The rally name's French word "rallye", as opposed to Italian "rally", was inspired by Rallye Automobile Monte Carlo. After another successful rally in 1929, the event was given to new organizers who decided to set up a street race through the town of Sanremo instead. The first one, 1° Circuito Automobilistico Sanremo, was held in 1937 and won by Achille Varzi. Rallye Sanremo was re-started in 1961 as Rallye dei Fiori ("Rally of the Flowers") and has been held every year since.

From 1970 to 1972, Rallye Sanremo was part of the International Championship for Manufacturers. From 1973 to 2003, the rally was on the World Rally Championship schedule, except for 1995 when the event was only part of the FIA 2-Litre World Championship for Manufacturers. The rally became the centre of controversy in 1986 after the stewards disqualified the factory Peugeot team at the end of the third day for using illegal side skirts, handing the victory to Lancia. Peugeot had used the same configuration in earlier rallies without any scrutineering problems and had also passed pre-rally scrutineering. Peugeot appealed but the organizers did not allow the team to continue the rally. FIA later confirmed that the exclusion had been illegal as the Peugeot cars were legal, and decided to annul the results of the whole event.

Sanremo or San Remo (Sanrœmu in Ligurian) is a city with about 57,000 inhabitants on the Mediterranean coast of western Liguria in north-western Italy. Founded in Roman times, the city is best known as a tourist destination on the Italian Riviera. It hosts numerous cultural events, such as the Sanremo Music Festival and the Milan – San Remo cycling classic. The city is widely accepted as the origin of the five-card stud variant telesina.

The name of the city is a phonetic contraction of Sant'Eremo di San Romolo, which refers to Romulus of Genoa, the successor to Syrus of Genoa. In Ligurian, his name is San Rœmu. The spelling San Remo is on all ancient maps of Liguria, the ancient Republic of Genoa, Italy in the Middle Ages, the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the Kingdom of Italy^{[citation needed]}. It was used in 1924 in official documents under Mussolini.

Once the Roman settlement of Matutia'or Villa Matutiana, Sanremo expanded in the Early Middle Ages when the population moved to the high grounds. The nobility built a castle and the walled village of La Pigna to protect the town from Saracen raids.