Villa Sole Mare, Cipressa, Italy

Hanging on the famous hill of a great classic of Italian cycling, such as the \"Milan-Sanremo\", and projected in a panoramic position over the Aregai marina, the foundation of the village is cloaked in legend.

According to tradition, in fact, the origin of Cipressa would be linked to the will of some shepherds coming from Cyprus who, perhaps having miraculously escaped a storm and landed on the shore of the \"Aregài\" (the area of the \"Drowned\"), climbed the hill up to to reach a well exposed place where to proceed with the construction of the main urban districts (Collautra, Poggio and Castello).

In reality, the toponym recalls other contexts, equally ancient and evocative; at the beginning of the Middle Ages, when the Lombard hordes (“Sippe”) ran through this area and thick forests of cypress trees (“cupressus”) grew, sacred trees in the Ligurian culture. The first certain information on the village, however, is linked to the first mention of the ancient parish church of Sant\'Antonio Abate in Costarainera (1153), when the village was still among the possessions of the Counts of Ventimiglia and was already concentrated around the area of their “castrum”, in the Castello district. During the thirteenth century, once the ancient feudal bond with the Ventimiglia family had broken down, the inhabitants of Cipressa were freed (1215) and ceded together with the village of Terzorio to the Benedictines of Santo Stefano di Villaregia (1225). A sale poorly digested by the lords of Lengueglia (Lingueglietta), who more than anyone else wanted to expand along that side of the valley and who, as is logical, contested its validity for a long time (1237 and 1275), always emerging defeated (1286 ).