What is the peculiar fancy for possessing a few pounds of phosphate of lime? Whence comes the devotion to relics?
S. Chrysostom tells us of pilgrims travelling from the ends of the earth to Arabia to see Job’s dunghill, and he says that they drew “much profit and philosophy” from the sight.
One can understand how that certain churches should be greedy to possess relics, and steal, or even invent them, because the possession brought money into their coffers; but the money would not have come had there not been, deep-seated in the hearts of the people, a conviction that there was something supernatural, a divine power surrounding and emanating from these relics.
For my own part I think it is a survival of the worship of ancestors that existed among the prehistoric races of Europe. We know that to them the sepulchre, the dolmen, the kistvaen, the cairn, were the most holy spots in the world, the centres of their common life, the tie that bound a clan together. When these primeval people became absorbed in conquering races, and adopted other religions, they carried along with them the cult of old bones and ashes. The ancestor was forgotten, and the spiritual father, the saint, took his place, and the worship of the dead was transferred from the ancestor of the tribe to the apostle of the new religion in the district.
Bordighera was founded in 1470 by thirty-two families, who migrated to it from Ventimiglia. There was, however, at the time some portion of walls standing, and these new settlers completed the enclosure, and squatted within.
At one time, perhaps even then, the sea came up to the foot of the rock, where are now orange and lemon orchards, but the current that sets from west to east along this coast filled it up. On digging, the old sea-shore is found, and the name Bordighera signifies a creek provided with stakes and nets for catching fish.
Bordighera is happy in having had an exhaustive historian, Mr. F. F. Hamilton (_Bordighera and the Western Riviera_, London, 1883), and this work is supplemented by Mr. W. Scott’s _Rock Villages of the Riviera_, London, 1898, by which he means the villages built upon rocky heights. He describes only such, however, as are near Bordighera. This book will be a help to such as desire to make excursions from that winter resort, and these two works together render it unnecessary for me to enter more fully into the history of Ventimiglia and its offspring Bordighera, and into minute description of them and their neighbourhood.