Most web radios are started by people who grew up listening to streaming, not broadcasting from a transmitter tower. Linea Radio Savona is the opposite. It was built in 2009 by a team whose radio careers began decades earlier, on the actual FM dial of a small Ligurian province.
A Founder Who Started on the Dial in 1976
According to FM-World's coverage of Savona's web radio scene, Linea Radio Savona was founded by Gianfranco Briano, a surveyor by trade who first stepped into a Savona studio in 1976 at Radio Europa Savona. That was the era of Italy's free radio movement, when a 1976 Constitutional Court ruling opened FM broadcasting to private stations for the first time and small local outlets sprang up across the country. Briano stayed close to that world for the rest of his career, working across a long list of regional stations before eventually building his own.
A Team That Learned Radio Before the Internet Existed
What sets Linea Radio Savona apart from a typical web radio startup is the resume of the people running it. Its on-air team, largely broadcasters in their fifties according to FM-World, includes Maria Grazia Cavalli, described as a historic Savona radio voice, alongside Walter, Fulvio Botta, Furio Ferro, and Carla Cerutti. Collectively they carry experience from stations including Radio Riviera Music, Radio Studio 5, Radio Skylab, Radio Country 105, Radio Vecchia Savona, Radio Savona Antenna, Radio Marina, and even national names like RAI Radio Tre, Radio DeeJay, RMC, and Italia 1. That is not a group of hobbyists learning to podcast, it is a small station staffed by people who spent their whole professional lives on the air before switching platforms.
Broadcasting From Via Famagosta
The station runs out of a rented studio on Via Famagosta in Savona, streaming around the clock at a high bit rate over the internet rather than FM. That shift, from transmitter to stream, is exactly the transition FM-World frames as a broader trend along the Ligurian coast, where a wave of web radios including Radio Anpi and the university-focused CampusWave have emerged as a new, low-cost way for local voices to keep reaching an audience after the FM dial became crowded and expensive to break into.
A Playlist Built Around the Decades That Made These Broadcasters
Musically, Linea Radio Savona leans into the eras its own team came up in, with particular attention to the 1970s and 1980s alongside a wider mix of major artists, film soundtracks, and live concert recordings. It is a station built less around chasing the current charts and more around the taste of broadcasters who have been curating Ligurian airwaves since before most streaming platforms existed.
Tune in to Linea Radio Savona on Radio Shuffle for a station run by broadcasters who learned their craft on Savona's FM dial decades before the internet gave them a second home.