Ajaccio

Ajaccio faces west across a wide gulf, a Corsican town where the mountains drop straight into the sea and beaches sit at the end of a bus line. The old quarter is a tight grid of ochre houses under a Genoese citadel, with a morning market of cheese, cured meat and citrus near the port. Napoleon was born here in 1769 and baptised in Ajaccio Cathedral, and Maison Bonaparte, the family house, is kept furnished as the Bonapartes left it. The Fesch Museum holds the largest collection of Italian painting in France after the Louvre, the legacy of Napoleon's uncle, a cardinal. Boats leave the harbour for the Scandola Nature Reserve, red porphyry cliffs reachable only from the water, and for the Sanguinaires Islands at the mouth of the gulf. Corsican cooking leans on pork, brocciu cheese, chestnut flour and myrtle. Behind it all stands the granite interior of the island.