Ajaccio as a city has a split personality. On the outer edges you will find the apartment blocks and cheap housing, sprawling outward and upward, with nondescript ring-road character, a lot of mobile fast-food vans in permanent parking positions, waste ground between graphically intense business premises, and only a faint sense of optimism. Round the harbours with their ferry terminals, cruise-liner berths, plaited traffic routes, archaeological digs and ancient buildings, there is quite another thing going on. This is where the munnee is, in the quaint daily market and ‘places’ complete with statues of heroes (guess who?), and runs of boutiques with frankly delightful objets waiting to be bought.
It’s difficult to restrain oneself from responding to these two kinds of cultural music. The ring roads are horrible. The old town is fascinating. Yet, of course, the people are the same…..
We headed to the Casa Bonaparte, the house where Napoleon himself was born, that meteoric rocket of a man, who started - how exactly? The only place for us to park was underground. Fine. We got to the house fairly early, and had to queue for no more than ten minutes till the doors were open. We were not the only English people in the queue but it was mostly French people. In we went. Up to the second floor……
We were not planning to stay for the full, whole experience, but just to walk through, and come back another time when we had more leisure (and I do not regret that decision). The house is absolutely fascinating. The family owned it from the late 1600s, and NP was born 15 Aug 1769, so it was with a grand-parently scale of time. The Bonapartes did not own the whole house - they had the cellars and the lower floors, while other families lived above. Napoleon’s mother brought (as a dowry) some farms and olive groves in the countryside, and the produce from this estate was stored and processed in those cellars. The family ate some and sold some, so this was a very moderately prosperous establishment. As a little boy, Napoleon could run down the alleys to the harbour and see for himself the shipping coming and going, the trade, the danger, the idea of faraway places. No doubt the family was proud, and hard, and industrious, and had an eye to the future.
We were not planning to stay for the full, whole experience, but just to walk through, and come back another time when we had more leisure (and I do not regret that decision). The house is absolutely fascinating. The family owned it from the late 1600s, and NP was born 15 Aug 1769, so it was with a grand-parently scale of time. The Bonapartes did not own the whole house - they had the cellars and the lower floors, while other families lived above. Napoleon’s mother brought (as a dowry) some farms and olive groves in the countryside, and the produce from this estate was stored and processed in those cellars. The family ate some and sold some, so this was a very moderately prosperous establishment. As a little boy, Napoleon could run down the alleys to the harbour and see for himself the shipping coming and going, the trade, the danger, the idea of faraway places. No doubt the family was proud, and hard, and industrious, and had an eye to the future.
But the patriotism of the island, the anti-French sentiment, was strong and the family did not agree with it. The disruption was strong enough for them to decide to leave - to move to Paris. The Bonapartes left Corsica. He was about 8 or 9 years old. Britain (as it happened) allied itself with the Corsican patriot Paoli, and (as I said) sent Nelson to help with their struggle against the French. And Napoleon, at a young age was sent into this meteoric trajectory which saw him as an Emperor, with his siblings as crowned heads of Europe, and he with powers greater than the Pope. All from a small grocer’s shop in a tiny Mediterranean port. It is astonishing.
The house as now presented is nothing like he would have known as a child, maybe with the exception of the cellars which were the stock room of the family trade. Upstairs, the building is now re-integrated (as the various family members bought the various bits back), and redecorated in an extraordinary mixture of regal and private. By the mid-19th century, Napoleon's nephew Emperor Napoleon III and his wife the Empress Eugenie came to stay - and by then of course the place was opened up, wallpapered, furnished with lovely things, lit withe chandeliers, and with ceiling hand-painted with the most elegant designs. But to see the dining room - it could pass still, today, as a country farm-house room with a plain round table and a few country chairs. There are mirrors, an eagle over a fireplace, some good maps and paintings, and various museum exhibits.
But still, that child, that little boy, that granite baby, who was born (so they say) on a plain, elegant spindly couch, divan or chaise-longue…. what sparked him off, what headed him into eternal glory and power, who can say?
But still, that child, that little boy, that granite baby, who was born (so they say) on a plain, elegant spindly couch, divan or chaise-longue…. what sparked him off, what headed him into eternal glory and power, who can say?
All I know is, I was surprised by how ordinary and humble his origins were, and how like the jumbled chaotic ambitions of my own family, and the families of people I know. Just ordinary.
We did not stay for the whole experience - listening to everything on the headphones. We walked through, and were perhaps the first of that morning’s visitors to leave, having been inside for just 50 minutes or so…. But already as we came out, there was a long queue waiting to get in.
We did not stay for the whole experience - listening to everything on the headphones. We walked through, and were perhaps the first of that morning’s visitors to leave, having been inside for just 50 minutes or so…. But already as we came out, there was a long queue waiting to get in.
We strolled through the food market, retrieved our car from its cool underground cavern, and headed up the coast towards the Iles Sanguinières….. millionaire-land if you like, with gated communities and smart planting. There are a few, just a very few blocks of flats out this way, but somehow different from the blocks at the back of the city. After a few failed attempts to find a beach-side restaurant open (many have closed down), we eventually found one. The large car park across the road was liberally adorned with mountains of rotting rubbish, as elsewhere…… and stinking.
But the little resto (les Girelles) was perfect, we could see the astonishing colours of the clear water and we ate pizzas (very nice at about £15 each), and I made a painting.
Rather than go back - though we were tired - we went to explore a little more of that headland and found ourselves in a vast field of wild flowers, of such vibrant colour and variety it was spellbinding. We stayed for ages, just looking, calming ourselves down. Wild roses, wild pea, orchids, daisies, tiny poppies, brilliant yellows, purples, whites, creams, pinks, blues, tall fennels, lavenders, wild oats and other grasses, euphorbias, layers and layers and layers of them, intermingled, differentiated, dazzling.
Then back, to rest, consider, snooze, pack. This was our last day in Corsica. We packed our flotsam cactus into its box packed in with beach shoes and laundry to keep it safe. We ate a picnic of gazpacho and biscuits and various ends of things. We crashed out.
Writing this today, at home, having faced the delays of the French air traffic control strike, and found a mutual acquaintance with the lady sitting in the seat beside us, and getting back in time to see Faversham’s Transport Weekend exhibitors, it all feels a bit strange…. Napoleon!!!! Wild flowers!!!!! Dazzling blue bays and soft sand!!!!! Snow-capped mountains!!!!! All this EXISTS. All the time. We unpacked the extraordinary flotsam cactus animal and it stands now in the front window. Another traveller.
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