The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
COLOUR CODE •
RED
Travel unlikely until next year. Do
not think about booking yet, except possibly for departures in
2022.
AMBER Situation remains uncertain, but be ready to book if and when that changes.
• GREEN Consider booking now for travel in June onwards.
In the mist before dawn, the strait of Bonifacio is colourless, “an ectoplasm of the sea in trance”, according to Dorothy Carrington. Corsica opens a drowsy eye on Sardinia across that seven-mile stretch of water, a choppy channel slicing the Tyrrhenian Sea from the Mediterranean. Chalky blue once the sun rises, its perilous shoals have haunted many thousands of sailors since Odysseus threaded his triremes from Aeolia.
Gloucestershire-born Carrington (1910-2002), semi-aristocratic, clever and independent of spirit, totted up three marriages before realising her deepest love, which was for Corsica. She first visited in 1948, when England was a bleak place. Having settled on the island for half a century, she wrote about its historical topography, among other things. She said her old life ended when she set foot on Corsican soil.
Bonifacio town overlooks her “ectoplasmic” strait, and Carrington observed that the view from the water upwards to the rockfastness of the medieval citadel “sums up all the daring and isolation of Bonifacian history” (though one might say Corsican history). The earliest navigators took refuge in Bonifacio’s harbour for better or worse, followed, across the centuries, by waves of Pisans, Saracens, Aragonese, Genoese, assorted pirates – all of whom left a mark on “Granite Island”, immortalised in Carrington’s book of the same name.
Carrington’s pages conjure the taste of aubergines à la bastienne, the heady whiff of myrtle and a curtainless open window framing a vista of peaks “like a tapestry”. Hiking and driving through the maquis, that dense, low, evergreen shrub land that covers much of Corsica, she noted that, though it looks uniform by day, each blade of foliage comes alive when the sun lowers. She wrote of mountains that “surge” into the sky, as they do, all over the granite island.
Bonifacio, or at least the old town, perches like a nest of wild birds on a pinnacle of granite accessed by vertiginous stone steps, the treads worn in the middle to a half moon. Sardinia looms large in the history and imagination on this southern tail of the French island. Corsica is three times smaller than its close Italian neighbour, and three times less populous, and its economy is a third of the size. But according to my Bonifacio-born landlord, Corsica is three times more beautiful.
It was Carrington who alerted the world to the megalithic history of the island, still visible in its menhirs – titanic standing stone statues concealed in the maquis. In Granite Island she writes of people whose menhirbuilding culture pops up across continents, and although scholarship has moved on, Carrington shines a torch into the past, still the most exotic foreign land.
Like all the best travel writers, she understood the importance of specificity; the value of suddenly switching from the wide-angle lens to the closeup; and of course the yeasty role of direct speech. The Corsican character, she implies, is as hard as the granite under foot, but she found tenderness among her adopted compatriots, and saw meaning in their lives of a kind she felt had fled the declining west. “I had touched life’s grain,” she wrote.
I followed Carrington’s footsteps from Bonifacio all the way up the east coast to Bastia; she went by motor car, I travelled in a public bus. Wedged between mountain and sea, Bastia flourished as an obscure provincial capital for centuries until Napoleon downgraded it in favour of his birthplace, Ajaccio. As Carrington noted, its main square, Saint-Nicolas – the size of six football pitches – is out of scale with the medieval rookeries around it. She described Bastia as “dilapidated”, and it still is, the pastel plaster of the tall, flatfronted houses pitted and flaking.
Resident Genoese made the port their capital and an Italianate flavour (and palette) lingers. Today’s visitor might find the town more of an Argentinian outpost, however: at 9pm one night at the start of the first lockdown, an open-air tango session rocked in one of the pedestrianised streets radiating spoke-like from Saint-Nicolas.
I watched people set up hand sanitisers on a trestle table next to the boombox. A woman parked a pram and pulled red suede tango shoes out of the netting pouch suspended from its handles. The Bastiais, who all seemed to know one another, danced the tango for many hours under pale Corsican moonlight.