CORSICA CAN KEEP BIGKIDS HAPPY...
THe Corsican flag is the ‘coolest’ ever, declare my three children, and Corsicans are clearly fond of it, too. The Mediterranean’s fourth largest island has been a part of France since 1768, yet its own flag is everywhere. It portrays the black head of a Moor, in profile, wearing a white bandana. And it hints at Corsica’s turbulent history, soaked in the blood of family feuds.
I confess to a minor feud of our own while we were there. It was my youngest’s 16th birthday, and my wife wanted to buy him a Corsican ‘vendetta knife’ with an olive-wood handle and lethal blade — purely for show, or wholesome activities such as whittling wood.
I hate knives. So we had what you might call a Corsican standoff. eventually, my wife prevailed, with the support of our older two children, elly, 22, and Joe, 20.
‘He won’t do anything dangerous with it,’ they assured me. Jake got his knife.
It was the only blip in a blissful two weeks, which we divided between the mountains and the coast in the far north-west of the island, the beguiling region of the Balagne.
The first week, we stayed in a house with its own chapel, up a hill on the edge of the village of Santa Reparata di Balagna. It was the perfect base.
Although the Balagne is fringed by glorious beaches, much is ruggedly mountainous and covered by the maquis, a dense scrub that gave its name to the French resistance fighters of World War II. Here and there are fortress villages that look hewn out of the rock, such as Monticello, where comedian Frank Muir had a holiday home for 40-odd years.
In high season, the impossibly pretty village of Pigna is rammed with tourists shuffling through steep, narrow streets, buying overpriced ceramics.
We preferred Felicetu, high on the ‘ Route du Vin’, the wine trail, where we shared the terrace of a small roadside bar with lean cyclists and old men as gnarled as the maquis.
‘I’ve never been anywhere so authentically itself,’ said my wife, normally a plain-speaking Yorkshirewoman, in a rare burst of lyricism. But I knew what she meant.
One day, we drove an hour inland to Fango, having heard about a series of dramatic rock pools, strung out along a meandering river. We sploshed for hours, our fun only interrupted by a family sunbathing next to us, who leapt up crying: ‘ Un serpent!’
It needed no translation. Jake reached for his knife, until I told him to save it for quartering the peaches.
For our second week, we moved to a house just outside Calvi, the biggest town of the Balagne, from which napoleon Bonaparte escaped back to France after his part in the island’s subjugation. Admiral nelson lost his right eye at the siege of Calvi in 1794.
Traditionally, the British and Corsicans are friends, something to do with our shared (historical) antipathy towards the French. We felt that warmth again and again in the Balagne, although not in Chez Tao, Calvi’s celebrated nightclub, founded 80 years ago by a Russian dancer and a nobleman reputed to have been one of Rasputin’s murderers.
We were there to toast Jake’s birthday. But our waitress remained impenetrably sullen. Maybe our celebrations weren’t hedonistic enough.
We loved Calvi, though, and its marriage of medieval citadel and sweeping beach.
The price of staying in such a beautiful spot is sharing it with the very rich, whose sleek yachts sit cheek-by-jowl in the marina, and whose wallets drive up the cost of the local wild boar ragu. But there are campsites among the pines; Calvi is still affordable.
And if you get the chance, strike out, too, into the Balagne hinterland. Mind the serpents, though.