The history of Bordighera is that of a small village of farmers and fishermen that became, within a few decades of the 19th century, one of the most elegant holiday resorts in Europe. Along the way there is a hermit from Egypt, thirty-two families who decide to rebuild an abandoned village, a \u201crepublic\u201d of eight villages, an English novel and a queen.<\/p>\n
In this article we retrace the main moments, from the fortified villages of prehistory to the 20th century. For each period we also point out the places where you can still find it today, walking around the town.<\/p>\n
The oldest traces are found on the hills. On Monte Nero and at Sapergo, opposite Sasso<\/a>, stood two castellari<\/em>, fortified villages of the pre-Roman Ligurians; the one at Sapergo, discovered in 1970, has revealed dry-stone walls later overlaid by Roman and medieval masonry.<\/p>\n In Roman times the area belonged to Albintimilium<\/em>, present-day Ventimiglia. In 13 BC the via Julia Augusta<\/strong> was opened, linking Italy with Gaul and running along the foot of the hill, on the route of today\u2019s via Romana<\/a>. On the plain, in 1955, a tomb from the imperial age was found, now reassembled at the Museo Bicknell<\/a>: evidence of a Roman farming settlement.<\/p>\n According to tradition, between the 4th and 5th centuries a hermit from the Thebaid, in Egypt, landed on the Capo: Ampelio<\/strong>. He lived in a cave among the rocks, worked as a blacksmith and, so it is said, brought with him the date stones from which the first palms grew. Over his cave rose the church of Sant\u2019Ampelio<\/a>, an 11th-century Romanesque building that the archaeologist Nino Lamboglia called a \u201cpalimpsest of ten centuries of history\u201d. In the Middle Ages the Capo had a Benedictine priory and a castle, destroyed by the Genoese in the 13th century.<\/p>\n The saint\u2019s relics had an eventful history: in 1140 Genoa had them taken to Sanremo, and in 1258 to Genoa, where they remained for almost seven centuries. They returned to Bordighera by sea only on 16 August 1947. The town still celebrates its patron saint on 14 May, as described in our article on the feast of Sant\u2019Ampelio<\/a>.<\/p>\n The name appears in a document of 1296, a bull of Pope Boniface VIII that mentions the monastery of Sant\u2019Ampelio \u201csubtus Burdigheta\u201d. According to the most widely accepted theory, Burdigheta<\/em> comes from bordigue<\/em>, a fish trap, that is, a basin for fish closed off by reed screens. In 1340 the village numbered just fifteen families and was subject to Ventimiglia; later it was abandoned.<\/p>\n The birth date of today\u2019s Bordighera is 2 September 1470<\/strong>. That day thirty-two families from the Castrum Sancti Nicolai<\/em>, present-day Borghetto San Nicol\u00f2<\/a>, met in their parish church and decided to rebuild the abandoned village \u201cin capo a Burdigheta\u201d. A deed of 18 June 1471 confirmed the decision. The new inhabitants were farmers and fishermen.<\/p>\n This is how Bordighera Alta<\/a> came into being, a village laid out as an irregular pentagon, enclosed by walls strengthened in the mid-16th century against pirate raids. In 1543, while the Turkish fleet was besieging Nice, pirates landed at Arziglia and captured men, women and children from the nearby villages. The bell tower of the church of Santa Maria Maddalena<\/a> was originally a watchtower. Of the fortified village, the gates remain: the Porta Sottana, with the Genoese coat of arms of St George, the 17th-century Porta del Capo, and the Porta Soprana, or Porta della Maddalena, from 1780.<\/p>\n For two centuries Bordighera remained under Ventimiglia, within the Republic of Genoa. Then, in 1673, eight villages decided to break away: Bordighera, Borghetto, Camporosso, San Biagio, Soldano, Sasso, Vallebona and Vallecrosia. On 21 April 1686<\/strong> the Magnifica Comunit\u00e0 degli Otto Luoghi<\/strong> (the Magnificent Community of the Eight Places) was born, a peaceful secession that gave the villages their own administration, still under the sovereignty of Genoa. Both dates are recorded on a plaque on the Oratorio di San Bartolomeo in Bordighera Alta. The Community lasted until the Napoleonic era, and the town\u2019s municipal Statute still mentions it today among the origins of the town.<\/p>\n Under the Ligurian Republic, in 1797, Bordighera became part of the \u201cGiurisdizione delle Palme\u201d (Jurisdiction of the Palms), with Sanremo as its capital. In 1812 the three cannons of the Marabutto<\/a> battery, on the beach, failed to prevent a landing by English ships. After the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, the village passed to the Kingdom of Sardinia, and in 1818 the new coast road commissioned by Napoleon, the \u201cGrande Cornice\u201d, arrived. When the Kingdom of Italy was born, in 1861, Bordighera had about 1,600 inhabitants.<\/p>\n Everything changed with a novel. In 1855 the Ligurian writer Giovanni Ruffini published Doctor Antonio<\/em> in Edinburgh, in English: the love story between a young Englishwoman and an Italian doctor, set among the palms of Bordighera. The book was a great success and prompted the first British travellers to seek out the landscape of the novel. In 1860 the first hotel opened, the Hotel d\u2019Angleterre, and in 1872 the railway arrived.<\/p>\n Within a few years Bordighera became a winter resort for European high society, above all the English. In winter the foreigners came to outnumber the residents, who were just over two thousand. The new town grew on the plain, along via Romana, with villas, hotels and gardens:<\/p>\n Among the leading figures of those years was the Parisian architect Charles Garnier<\/strong>, designer of the Paris Op\u00e9ra and the Monte Carlo Casino. In 1871 he bought land at Arziglia and built his villa<\/a> there; he also designed the school that since 1886 has been the town hall, Palazzo Garnier<\/a>, and the church of Terrasanta<\/a>. In 1878 Clarence Bicknell<\/strong> arrived as Anglican chaplain, a botanist and scholar of the rock engravings of Mont Bego, who in 1888 opened the museum that bears his name. The Scottish writer George MacDonald lived in Bordighera for over twenty years, until 1902, in his Casa Coraggio, and the German gardener Ludwig Winter created his palm nurseries here.<\/p>\n In 1884 Claude Monet<\/strong> came to paint: he arrived on 18 January and stayed until early April, captivated by the light and the gardens. His story is told in Monet in Bordighera<\/a>. The Queen of England, on the other hand, never stayed here: according to the Comune, Queen Victoria drove by carriage from Menton to the Capo on 4 April 1882 and turned back, and a stay booked years later at the Hotel Angst was cancelled because of the Anglo-Boer War.<\/p>\n The presence most loved by the people of Bordighera was that of Margherita of Savoy<\/strong>. The queen came for the first time in September 1879, as a guest at Villa Bischoffsheim, today\u2019s Villa Etelinda<\/a>, and returned several times in the following years. In 1914 she bought land along via Romana and had her residence built there, inaugurated in 1916: today it is Villa Regina Margherita<\/a>. The queen died here on 4 January 1926.<\/p>\n Edmondo De Amicis also loved Bordighera, the \u201cparadise of the English\u201d, and died here in 1908. In 1904 Father Giacomo Viale, parish priest of Bordighera Alta, founded the small sanctuary almost at the summit of Monte Nero<\/a>.<\/p>\n With the First World War the golden age came to an end: in 1917 the Hotel Angst was requisitioned as a military hospital, and the foreign colony never returned to its former numbers. In 1929 a royal decree granted the Comune its current coat of arms, with a pine tree and a rampant golden lion on a red field. In 1937 the Istituto Internazionale di Studi Liguri was founded by Nino Lamboglia; it is based in the Museo Bicknell.<\/p>\n On 12 February 1941 Bordighera was the setting for the meeting between Mussolini and the Spanish dictator Franco. During the Second World War the town was bombed several times, and the English, who had returned home in the years before the conflict, left behind villas and collections: among them the library, which passed to the Comune.<\/p>\n The post-war years brought a new season. In July 1947 Evita Per\u00f3n, visiting Italy, spent a day in Bordighera and inaugurated the seafront promenade, which has been called Lungomare Argentina<\/a> ever since. In the same year the Salone Internazionale dell\u2019Umorismo<\/strong> (International Humour Exhibition) was born, conceived by Cesare Perfetto, which for over fifty years, until 1999, brought cartoonists and humorists from all over the world to Bordighera. In the 1950s the town also hosted exhibitions of contemporary American painting, among the first opportunities in Italy to see art from across the Atlantic.<\/p>\n Today Bordighera is a town of about ten thousand inhabitants, with the hamlets of Sasso and Borghetto San Nicol\u00f2 on the hills. It has been twinned with Villefranche-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera, since 1956, and with Neckarsulm, in Germany, since 1963. The people of Bordighera have preserved the memory of every period in its history: the village of 1470, the 19th-century villas and gardens, and the palms that earned it the nickname of the city of palms, described in the article The palms of Bordighera<\/a>.<\/p>\nSant\u2019Ampelio and the Middle Ages<\/h2>\n
1470: the birth of Bordighera Alta<\/h2>\n
The Magnifica Comunit\u00e0 degli Otto Luoghi<\/h2>\n
From Napoleon to the Unification of Italy<\/h2>\n
The 19th century: the English arrive<\/h2>\n
\n
Queen Margherita and the Belle \u00c9poque<\/h2>\n
The 20th century: wars, recovery and culture<\/h2>\n
Bordighera today<\/h2>\n