Today we visited the second largest city on Corsica. Bastia was founded around 1370 as a Citadel guarding a port that Genoa was trying to use to rule Corsica. Over time it became the primary port for Northern Corsica and today is the primary ferry port to connect to mainland France and northern Italy, we will be departing from here on Tuesday. Italy is closer to Corsica than France is, and there are two prominent islands off shore that are part of Italy, one of which is Elba where Napoleon lived in exile until his death.
Corsica has always been a tough place to govern. All of the major cities are fortress towns where the off island rulers (Genoa, and France) have tried with mixed success to control the interior of the island. The extreme ruggedness of the center of the island makes it a rebels paradise. Even today as we were driving into Bastia, most of the highway overpasses and bridges had “Corsica is not French” spray painted on them, so even today there is a Corsican independence movement.
We accomplished another thing today as we decided to park at the ferry terminal for the day, so our trip in to catch the ferry on Tuesday will now be a little easier as we know the route and the layout of the terminal. As we walked into the town center we came across a sprawling Sunday market on the main square of the city.
The largest part of the market was a huge flea market. While interesting for people watching, other peoples junk is generally not our thing. So we passed thru pretty quickly.
We kept on thru the center of the city and next found ourselves at the harbor. The harbor was where all of the high end restaurants were located. We did some window shopping, but in the end decided to have a home cooked lunch today.
Our last stop for the day was the citadel built above the harbor to protect it. The citadel was a good climb up, and as we were walking up it I saw a sign saying that one of the problems that Bastia has always had to deal with is connecting the citadel above the town with the harbor. Today the answer appeared to be that the lower town and the harbor are the center of the town, and the citadel is very quiet.
The lower town was very lively, the market was busy, and the restaurants were full. When we got to the citadel it was mostly empty, and except for one restaurant all of the businesses were closed. It was quite a contrast.
We wandered about for a few more minutes looking at signs describing the buildings, for the first time today we heard languages besides French. Our conclusion was that the citadel was for tourists and since the season is over all of the businesses have packed up. So we headed back to François and out to our campsite for the day.
On the way to the campground we wanted to swing into a grocery store to pick up a few supplies. Unfortunately, all of the parking lots at the major grocery chains we saw had height barriers. This is a uniquely annoying French thing where they put gates at about 2.6 meters above ground to keep oversized vehicles out of parking lots. Sometimes you can find a back entrance, or a secondary lot that is not restricted, but today I didn’t want to go on the search, so we decided to keep our money to ourselves.
