The rain this morning made no apologies. We could see the massive dark mass of clouds arriving from the north west quite a while before the rain actually started. We we driving along a narrow spit of sandy land between the sea and an inland lagoon called Etang Biguglia, admiring the mix of trees and the green peacefulness of the place, but by the time we reached Bastia just 15km away, the monsoon arrived. It was a ferocious rain. The roads became rivers. The water had nowhere to go. Drains became fountains as the surge of the flood pushed up out of the ground. As this was our first visit it was impossible to know if this is a normal occurrence, or something unusual.
Miraculously, we found a parking place right down in the old port, which sits behind a handsome sea wall surmounted by a pair of grand lights - red and green. The port is ringed with tall buildings, mostly pretty ancient, and brooding overall is the bastion, or the bastions, currently a museum but unmistakably military. We had coffee, strolled up the hill, recognising there's too much to be seen in each of these places. It will be less stressful if we regard this whole trip as something of a recce for future visits. Bastia is a great place, a real place, working, and with lots of students and cafes and activity. Definitely worth a longer visit.
Our options were utterly governed by uncertainty about the weather. The rain and mist were so powerful it would be a shame to make the trip round the Corniche (the northern cape of the island), with its millions of twists and turns along the coast road, if we could see nothing.
So we chose instead to go westerly over the ridge, and see if the west coast was any better. The road up to Col de Teghime was ornamented by strings of cyclists, in their tight lycra and apparently effortless determination to push on to infinite heights and distances. We stopped at the Col - where a gun is on display, and the story told of how this was the first part of France to be liberated in the war, in 1943. The stone letterings are in French and Corsican, but do not say who the battle was against....
Up there, where the land forms a crisp crest dividing east from west, you can see the mist and fog actually forming right in front of your eyes.
We pressed on to the west, towards Patrimonio (the wine centre of Corsica), and then down to St Florent. Again we could see how the rocks change from schists to granite, and the plants create a different harmony, and the trees amend their outlines to match the climate and the wind, and the flowers change in each tiny bend of the road.
St Florent has a fine yachting harbour and enough rich visitors as a result to allow some of the restaurants to charge €70 for a plate of beef, but there are also pizza houses and cafes and brasseries. We ate in a hotel dining room which took a serious approach to food.
They brought us a tiny cup of Jerusalem Artichoke soup laced with walnut oil, and then Andrew ate squid with herb risotto while I had a lasagne of local goats cheese. It was absolutely splendid and cost us €47 including one glass of wine, one bottle of water, and two local desserts based on chestnut and that local goats cheese again.
Horatio Nelson came to St Florent, fighting under Admiral Hood to support the Corsicans who were rebelling against the French, and it was very soon after that he joined battle against the French again a little further west at Calvi - where he lost an eye.
We wanted to go and see the original Martello Tower - actually called the Tour de Mortella - but although it's only a few miles across the bay from St Florent, it's about an hour and a half's drive to get there, so we reluctantly decided against it this time. Instead we went south-east to the unknown village of Penta-di-Casinca. This was because Andrew's sister Gillie's partner James had announced that this is where part of his family came from..... We went to see if we could find anything of his origins.
Up and up we went, with speedy Corsican drivers pleased to overtake us on the precipitous roads. When we got there, we were really astonished to find a tiny city perched on a mountain-top, with tall and ancient buildings of 4 or 5 stories, narrow streets, and a densely settled area. This is quite unlike other villages we have seen which tend to be lower and more sprawling. Penta is unmistakably Italian in tone. The rain was still hammering down and the mist sprawled and twisted around us. There was no view, at all.
But we parked, scuttled around in the rain, went into the church which is crammed with statues and carvings, and then into an almost invisible cafe - the Cafe du Centre. There the owner told us that James' family were all décédée, but the house is still there. We had a bit of a muddle about this as he spoke in dialect/Corsican and I thought he meant one of the huge but ruined houses along the main street, but then he said no, it was not ruinée, and so I think the house he meant was a massive Renaissance house, with MCCCCCXX carved over the door, and its back wall forming part of the ramparts of the citadel.
We sent photos back to Gillie and she said she and James would be visiting soon. What excitement!
The whole story of the island is one of conquest, culture, control, forced trade and taxation, and of course emigration... Who would not want to own and control this beautiful, rich and beguiling place? It is one of the greatest treasures of civilisation, and sufficiently argumentative to keep exploitive tourism at bay, so not a lot of people know about it. But it is glorious.
Heading home again, finally, still in the rain and mist, we stopped - down on the sandy marsh - at a place where an ancient church lies directly in the path of the road. You have to drive right round it, in a weird wiggle. The church stands all alone, you feel, in the prairie. It is made of whitish stone, and completely plain, almost totally unadorned. It is Pisan. It dates from 1119. It is built on the site of a Roman basilica, part of the paleochristian development of a Roman port founded here in 100 BC. There are a few Roman foundations excavated around it, that work being done just before the war. But since then, technology and international interest have revealed far more. This was a city called Mariana, named for the general who founded the place as a centre for Mediterranean trade, one Marius. The site extends to more than 30 hectares, most of that utterly invisible under the flat fields. They are now building a huge new archaeological museum to explain all this. The new building can be seen a couple of fields away, modern and rather lovely. But the little church, once a cathedral, is the star. It shines. Utterly plain. Utterly beautiful. This building alone is enough reason to book a return visit to Corsica. It is wondrous.
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