Soggiorna
You can walk through the three gates of Bordighera Alta in a few minutes. But three hundred and ten years separate the first from the last, and that is the most interesting thing about the whole village.
- Porta Sottana, to the west, dates from 1470.
- Porta del Capo, the middle one, is seventeenth-century.
- Porta Soprana, called della Maddalena, was opened in 1780.
A village that takes three centuries to open its third gate is not a lazy village: it is one that had serious reasons to stay shut for a very long time. The pentagonal walls holding them together say the same thing.
Founded in a single day, and we know which one
Most Ligurian villages grew by accretion, and nobody can say when they began. Not Bordighera Alta: it has a founding date.
On 2 September 1470 thirty-two families from Borghetto San Nicolò — the old Castrum Sancti Nicolai — met in the parish church and resolved to build a new village on the headland. Not a slow migration: a decision, taken in one room, on one day.
Walking the alleys you can see the result of that decision: a compact plan, conceived all at once, where nothing about the way the houses lean on each other is accidental.
Sant'Ampelio, and Liguria's southernmost point
Below the village, on the rocks, stands the eleventh-century church of the patron saint. The cape it occupies is the southernmost point in all Liguria — not of this province: of the whole region.
Ampelio arrived here by boat from Egypt around 400 AD and lived in the caves of the cliff. The village built itself around that hermit's memory a thousand years later, and the church still stands where he did, on the rock, at the water's edge.
It is also why the English came to winter here rather than somewhere else: in Liguria, you cannot go further south.
The palms, which are a privilege and not a climate
Bordighera is called the town of palms, and the reason is not botanical: it is a papal decree.
In 1586 Sixtus V had the Egyptian obelisk raised at the centre of St Peter's Square: twenty-five metres of granite, some three hundred tonnes, lifted with winches and ropes by hundreds of men. The pope had imposed absolute silence on pain of death, so that every order could be heard.
When the ropes began to smoke with friction and give way, a sailor, Benedetto Bresca, broke the silence and shouted to wet them. Wet rope contracts: the obelisk rose.
Instead of having him executed, Sixtus V asked what he wanted. Bresca asked, for his homeland, the right to supply the Vatican with the woven palms — the parmureli — for Palm Sunday. That privilege has never been revoked, and the palms still leave from here every spring.
So the palms along the seafront are not nineteenth-century tourist decoration: they are a crop, and they are three centuries older than tourism.
One clarification that has to be made
Sanremo claims the same story, and holds that Bresca was theirs. The sources divide and the argument is still alive: every year, when the parmureli leave for Rome, it reopens.
We award the title to neither. But the fact that two towns have argued for centuries over a sailor who shouted one sentence is, in itself, the best way to understand how much that privilege mattered.
What remains of the English, in and around the village
The Bicknell Museum opened in 1888, founded by the English naturalist Clarence Bicknell, and is the oldest museum in western Liguria. Today it houses the International Institute of Ligurian Studies and a library with forty thousand volumes in Italian, twenty thousand in English, six thousand in French and three thousand in German.
That ratio between languages is the most honest census of the Bordighera of the day that exists.
Villa Regina Margherita, built between 1914 and 1916 for the first queen of Italy — who died here in 1926 — is now a museum.
What NOT to expect
Bordighera Alta is small. You can walk it in under an hour, and anyone arriving expecting a half-day village will be caught out. The value is in the density, not the extent.
It is not a museum village. People live here, washing hangs out, and there is none of the row of souvenir shops you get elsewhere. That is a virtue, but it is worth knowing.
The palms are down below, not up here. The hill village is stone; the palms are along the sea and in the gardens of the villas.
The full picture of the town is in Bordighera: the complete guide, and the hour-by-hour route in what to see in Bordighera in a day.
Frequently asked questions
When was Bordighera Alta founded?
On 2 September 1470, when thirty-two families from Borghetto San Nicolò met in the parish church and resolved to build the village on the headland. It is one of the few Ligurian places with a precise founding date.
How many gates does the village of Bordighera Alta have?
Three: Porta Sottana of 1470, seventeenth-century Porta del Capo, and Porta Soprana, called della Maddalena, opened in 1780. More than three centuries separate the first from the last.
Why do Bordighera's palms go to the Vatican?
Because of a privilege granted by Sixtus V in 1586 to the sailor Benedetto Bresca, who broke the silence imposed during the raising of the obelisk in St Peter's Square by shouting to wet the ropes. Since then the woven palms, the parmureli, have left from here for Palm Sunday. Sanremo claims the same story and the question is unresolved.
What is the Bicknell Museum?
The oldest museum in western Liguria, opened in 1888 by the English naturalist Clarence Bicknell. It houses the International Institute of Ligurian Studies and a library with forty thousand volumes in Italian and twenty thousand in English.
How long do you need to visit Bordighera Alta?
About an hour for the village, plus the time to walk down to the church of Sant'Ampelio on the cape. It is small: the value is in the density, not the extent.