Bordighera is located at 20 km from France and it is possible to see the French coast with a naked eye from the town. Having the "Capo Sant’Ampelio" which protrudes into the sea, it is the southernmost commune of the region. The cape is at around the same latitude of Pisa and features a little church built in the XIth Century for Sant’Ampelio, the patron saint of the city. Since Bordighera is built where the Maritime Alps plunge into the sea it benefits from the Foehn effect which creates a special microclimate that has warmer winters.

It seems that has been inhabited by the time of the Palaeolithic era since archaeologic researchers have found signs of human activities in the caves that are situated on the Italian and French coast. The first humans to alter the territory and create a structured society arrived in the VIth Century B.C., they were the Ligures, population from which derives the name of the region, "Liguria" in Italian.

The name of the city appears for the first time as "Burdigheta" in 1296, in a papal Bill written by Pope Boniface VIII. The area was particularly prosperous during Roman times because it was situated on the via Julia Augusta in the Ist Century B.C. After the fall of the Roman Empire the village was abandoned because of the frequent attacks by pirates and it is only in 1470 that some families of nearby villages such as the Borghetto San Nicolò decided to return to Bordighera. The Moorish pirates started becoming rarer and rarer even though some particularly cruel ones still occasionally happened such as the one by the pirate Hayreddin Barbarossa in 1543. With pirate attacks diminishing the strategic importance of the area became obvious to the Dukes of Savoy and the Republic of Genoa which fought for the territory in the XVIth Century. The small village was quickly transformed into a fortified town and gained importance until it became independent from the rival city "Ventimiglia" in 1683.

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Wikipedia