Coasting in Corsica

I stood on the top deck of the ferry Napoleon Bonaparte, looking down on the wine-dark sea that separates Marseilles, France, from Corsica. A Frenchman turned to me and said that a delegation of Corsicans petitioned Napoleon when he was emperor. Napoleon didn’t much like Corsicans and greeted them with, “I Corsicani sono tutti banditti.” (“Corsicans are all bandits.”)

“No tutti, sire,” the delegation’s leader replied, “ma buona parte.” (“Not all, sire, but a large part of us.”)

Napoleon, Corsica’s most famous native son, had a sense of humor and granted their petition. The tale was but just one I heard during 2 1/2 months I spent on the island while finishing a novel last spring.

Corsica, about 110 miles southeast of France’s Co^te d’Azur, is a lost continent. For thousands of years, the 3,350-square-mile island was key to the control of the central Mediterranean. The Greeks called it Kaliste, the isle of beauty, and it remains today much as they found it around 600 BC: a great snowcapped mountain chain 9,000 feet high rising abruptly above the pristine sea, with a jagged coastline interspersed with harbors and sandy beaches.

One way to explore the island is to ride a train from Bastia in the northeast to Ajaccio (ah-ZHAK-syo) about 95 miles to the southwest, as I did, then continue south by car about 75 miles to Bonifacio, past haunting stone statues dating back thousands of years. From there, other highways cross back north to the fashionable resort town of Calvi on the western coast.

After the fall of Rome in 476, Corsica (“Corse” in French) suffered through 15 centuries of conquests. Vandals, Goths, Saracens, Aragonese, Pisans, Genoese, Barbary pirates and the British ruled the place until the French finally took over late in the 18th century. These days, the invasion comes from more than a million tourists from Europe.

My trip began with the 12-hour overnight ride in an immense square cocoon of a ship (2,650 passengers, 708 cars). We descended into Bastia, the island’s capital for hundreds of years until Napoleon transferred the administrative center to Ajaccio in 1801.

Since then, Bastia has slumbered. The city (population 39,000) has a central plaza leading to the citadel, which hovers over a tiny harbor. Inside its walls, the look is virtually unchanged from its 13th century origins.

It’s a somnolent place now. There isn’t much to see except the never-fading charm of narrow alleys and streets in an unspoiled medieval city. Scabrous five-story stone houses, ubiquitous throughout Corsica as a defense against pirates, surround the harbor. Chic restaurants and cafes occupy the ground floor. To the north of the citadel, the 17th century Terra Vecchia neighborhood is full of restaurants, cafes, brasseries, bakeries and butcher shops.

I spent a morning and early afternoon in Bastia eating in one of the many open-air restaurants along the main plaza with a view of the harbor. The food, here and elsewhere, is mostly based on a variety of seafood, from raw sea urchins to lobster, plus wild boar, lamb and dishes built around the infinite varieties of goat cheese.

The little diesel train that crosses the island’s mountainous spine leaves at 3:30 every afternoon from Bastia and spends the next three hours in a vertiginous passage along its single-track, narrow-gauge roadbed. Heading southwest across the island toward Ajaccio, the train clings to the edges of slashes in the granite mountains and rattles through tunnels cut by hand in the 1800s.

Great snowcapped peaks look down on the dark and mysterious maquis, flowering aromatic shrubs and trees. For centuries clan members roamed these hills in the endemic feuds called vendettas.

Halfway to Ajaccio, the train stops in Corte, the island’s capital during a period of independence from 1755 to 1769. Now it’s home to a university and a hotbed of another independence movement, which stresses, among other things, the study of the Corsican language besides standard French in schools. The town has been the heart of the island’s traditions and culture since Gen. Pasquale Paoli founded the short-lived Corsican republic and ruled from here.

Corte is small and compact. Its one long street, the Cours Paoli, ends in a charming little square dominated by the general’s statue and ringed with cafes and restaurants full of students.

The rest of the journey toward Ajaccio has, without a doubt, the most spectacular mountain scenery I’ve encountered.

As the train descended into the valleys, a single shaggy horse, as tough as the mountains around him, appeared in a meadow among a herd of goats and sheep. One of hundreds of tiny Romanesque churches rose on a hill, its rounded front hunkered against the wind. The train rattled on, packed with chattering students bent on a weekend at home in Ajaccio.

Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Ajaccio on Aug. 15, 1769, and lived there until age 9, when he left to study on the Continent. His birth house still stands on Place Letizia, named after his mother, on the west side of Rue Bonaparte in the old town.

Ajaccio is a relatively modern town for Corsica, founded in 1453 by Genoese occupiers. It’s a small place, 60,000 people, situated around the axis of the Avenue de Paris and the Cours Napoleon, its Fifth Avenue, a humming collection of shops, restaurants, post office, prefecture and the theater Kaliste.

If you follow the Avenue de Paris to its end, you arrive at the Place d’Austerlitz, where an immense statue of Napoleon stares down from the hilltop. Another rises in Roman splendor in the Place Foch, the emperor depicted like Caesar. And still another is in the central plaza, the Place de Gaulle, which shows him mounted on a stallion surrounded by his four brothers.

At the heart of Ajaccio is the narrow, cobblestoned Rue Cardinal Fesch. Now a pedestrian mall, it embodies the pulsating heart of a Mediterranean town, its small shops and cafes crowding into the center. Painters and artisans show their wares around the immense Musee Fesch, a museum with a superb collection of Renaissance paintings collected by Cardinal Joseph Fesch, a relative of Napoleon’s.

The highway south from Ajaccio toward Bonifacio passes through spectacular Genoese fortified towns. Halfway to Bonifacio is the most impressive site on the island: Filitosa, tucked on a back road leading to the tourist resort of Propriano. Here, 6,000- to 8,000-year-old menhirs, or stone monuments, cover a hill and valley, their haunting, corroded facades remnants of an unknown civilization.

Farther south is a turnoff for the tiny seaside village of Tizzano. The route leads to two impressive collections of Neolithic monuments. About three miles along the winding road, a mountain path leads into the maquis and to strange statue sentinels among the Fontanaccia Dolmen, a 4,000-year-old burial chamber, the best preserved on the island. Farther along the road is the path to Pelaggiu, site of the largest collection of menhirs on the island, more than a hundred standing guard.

Coming out of the mountainous coast road, the immense bulk of Bonifacio’s citadel rises over the yacht basin. This is Genoa’s lasting monument to its 500-year domination of the island. Strolling through the town’s cobblestone streets, you come upon a small square dominated by the Eglise Sainte Marie Majeur, a former church built in the 14th century.

As elsewhere, the original houses here did not have doors. The inhabitants entered by a ladder, which they pulled up to avoid attacks. A stroll through Bonifacio’s streets tells more than any guidebook about how it must have felt for a besieged people, ever at the mercy of the powerful nations that coveted this land, alternately enslaving its people and corrupting its leaders.

A traveler heading north toward Calvi, about 150 miles away, first moves along the island’s fertile eastern plain. You pass through vineyards, orchards and endless beaches, lined with beige villas tucked among forests of parasol pines. The towns are small, modern and dull.

Crossing the island toward the west coast, you pass Calenzana, a historic town of 1,500, and arrive at Calvi. This city offers a different, lighter Corsica. A fashionable resort for wealthy Europeans even in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was a rival of St. Tropez and Antibes in the ‘50s as its harbor filled with luxury yachts.

From here, the road south toward Ajaccio is spectacular. It winds and twists along perpendicular cliffs for about 60 miles, its hairpin curves overlooking granite gorges plunging down onto tiny beaches and empty coves.

It’s a national forest, Parc Naturel Regional de la Corse--France’s largest, unspoiled and awesome. At road’s end is Cargese, founded in the 1600s by Greeks ejected by Turks in the southern Peloponnesus. Cargese sums up the charms of this island: Less saturnine and grim than the medieval towns, it more closely resembles seaside cities of the Riviera and Greece, a smiling place full of grace and open to the sun and sea.

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GUIDEBOOK

Across the Corsican Countryside

Getting there: The most accessible airport on Corsica is Bastia. From LAX, fly nonstop to Paris on United, Delta, American or Air France, land at Charles de Gaulle airport and switch to Orly airport, from which Air France flies to Bastia. Restricted round-trip fares from LAX begin at $598 if tickets are purchased by Wednesday and $684 if purchased by Oct. 24.

Car ferries depart from Marseilles, Nice and Toulon in France to Ajaccio, Bastia and other Corsican cities.

SNCM Ferryterranee, 61 Boulevard des Dames, Marseilles 13226; tel. 011-33-491-56-3200, fax 011-33-491-56-3636, Internet https://www.sncm.fr. Accommodations range from recliners to staterooms. One-way adult fares are about $14 to $39 (plus tax) for a reclining seat; car tariffs vary by vehicle size.

Where to stay: In Bastia, the Hotel Forum, 20 Boulevard Paoli; telephone 011-33-495-31-0253, fax 011-33-495-31-6560. Intimate hotel in center of town. Doubles about $50 a night.

In Ajaccio, the Hotel San Carlu, 8 Boulevard Danielle Casanova; tel. 011-33-495-21-1384, fax 011-33-495-21-0999. Modernized 17th century building in old town overlooking citadel and port. Doubles about $75.

In Bonifacio, Hotel La Caravelle, 37 Quai Comparetti; tel. 011-33-495-73-0003, fax 011-33-495-73-0041. Stylish French hotel with great restaurant. Doubles $93 to $160 a night.

Where to eat: In Calvi, Emile’s, Quai Landry; local tel. 0495-65-0960. Terrace restaurant under battlements of the citadel; excellent seafood and Northern Italian cuisine. About $35 per person with wine.

In Ajaccio, La Funtana, 9 Rue Notre Dame; tel. 0495-21-7804. The best restaurant on the island, with Continental and Corsican dishes, plus elegant ambience. About $50 per person, excluding wine.

In Bonifacio, Stella d’Oro, 7 Rue Doria, tel. 0495-73-0363. Specializes in Corsican dishes including merizzane (stuffed eggplant); medieval ambience with stone walls and wood beams. Three-course meal with wine, $20 to $30.

For more information: French Government Tourist Office, 9454 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 715, Beverly Hills, CA 90212-2967; tel. (310) 271-6665 or (410) 286-8311 (France-on-Call hotline), fax (310) 276-2835, Internet https://www.franceguide.com.