Ajaccio

• 1. Introduction

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  Ajaccio sits on the west coast of Corsica, 210 nautical miles southeast of Marseille, curled around a sheltered gulf beneath wooded hills. Its name may trace back to a Greek hero, or to Tuscan words for sheep pens, or to a Byzantine Greek phrase meaning "good mooring." No one is certain. What is certain is that the city has been claimed, abandoned, rebuilt, sold, liberated, and celebrated for more than fifteen centuries. It produced Napoleon Bonaparte. It was the first French town freed from Nazi occupation. It holds the French record for thunderstorms. And its urban fabric is split between a warren of narrow Mediterranean streets and concrete towers rising from a post-war demographic boom. How did a small harbor on a granite island become the capital of Corsica, the birthplace of emperors, and a city that still carries the weight of all that history? The answers begin in the mud beneath a Genoese citadel built in April 1492.

• 2. Ancient Foundations

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  Pope Gregory the Great mentioned the seat of a diocese at Ajaccio in the year 591, making the city significant enough for papal correspondence more than a millennium before Napoleon. Gregory wrote again in 601, this time in Epistle 77, urging the Defensor Boniface not to leave Aléria and Adjacium without bishops. That letter is the earliest certain written record of a settlement with a name ancestral to the city's modern one. The word Adjacium was not standard Latin, which suggests it was a Latinization of something older, though what that original language was remains unknown.

  The Greek geographer Ptolemy did not mention Ajaccio by name in the 2nd century AD, despite mapping the island in some detail. Ptolemy's coastal geometry was distorted enough that it is impossible to place his unnamed features with confidence. What he did record was a Roman city called Ourchinion, positioned north of where Ajaccio sits, which may have been the town of Sagone. Roman coins turned up on the Hill of San Giovanni for centuries, and farmers planting vines kept unearthing terracotta funerary urns.

  The decisive archaeological confirmation came in 2005, when construction plans on that same hill prompted the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research to excavate. Workers uncovered the baptistry of a 6th-century cathedral and large quantities of pottery dated to the 6th and 7th centuries AD. Beneath the old church lay a cemetery; inside it was a single Roman grave covered with roof tiles bearing short indecipherable inscriptions. The Roman coins and that grave form the only physical evidence so far linking the Roman and early Christian settlements on the site. The 6th-century baptistry now registered as a historical monument is known as the Early Christian Baptistery of Saint John.

• 3. The Genoese Rebuild

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  Work on the new Ajaccio began on the 21st of April 1492, when the Bank of Saint George at Genoa sent an architect named Cristoforo of Gandini to the site. The Genoese had considered three locations: the Pointe de la Parata, rejected because it was too exposed to wind; the ancient city, ruled out because salt ponds nearby made it unsafe; and finally the Punta della Lechia, which they chose. Gandini started by building a castle on Capo di Bolo, then constructed residences for several hundred people around it.

  For some years the new town was a colony in the strict sense: Corsicans were barred from entering. The inhabitants were Genoese citizens who, almost until the French conquest, were legally citizens of the Republic of Genoa and drew a sharp distinction between themselves and the island Corsicans living in the suburb of Borgu, just outside the city walls. The main street of that suburb was the current rue Fesch. Over time the city opened to Corsicans and grew into the administrative capital of the province of Au Delà Des Monts, which corresponds roughly to the modern Corse-du-Sud. Bastia remained the capital of the whole island.

  Ajaccio changed hands between France and Genoa more than once. French troops occupied it from 1553 to 1559, then the Treaty of Cateau Cambresis returned it to the Genoese. When Pasquale Paoli proclaimed the Corsican Republic in 1755, he took most of Corsica but could not dislodge Genoese garrisons from the citadels at Saint-Florent, Calvi, Ajaccio, Bastia, and Algajola. Paoli went on to build his republic around them. The Genoese eventually sold the entire island to France in 1768, and French troops of the Ancien Régime replaced the Genoese soldiers in Ajaccio's citadel. Corsica was formally annexed to France in 1780. The citadel itself, built in 1554, still stands as a registered historical monument.

• 4. Napoleon's City

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  Napoleon Bonaparte, born at Ajaccio in 1769 as Napoleone di Buonaparte, arrived in the same year as the Battle of Ponte Novu, the defeat that ended the Corsican Republic his father had served. Carlo di Buonaparte, an attorney, had been secretary to Pasquale Paoli during the republic's brief life. The family home was a large four-story building in town, now preserved as the Maison Bonaparte museum. They also had a country house in the hills north of the city, on a site that is today the Arboretum des Milelli.

  Napoleon came back to Ajaccio not as a tourist but as Inspector General of Artillery, dispatched to take the citadel from royalists who had held it since 1789. The mission failed. Paolists allied with royalists defeated French forces in two pitched battles. Napoleon, his mother Laetitia, and the rest of the family fled, hiding by day while Paolists burned their estate. In June 1793, friends carried Napoleon and Laetitia out by ship. They landed in Toulon with nothing beyond Napoleon's military pay.

  By 1797 the family was back in Ajaccio, now under the protection of General Napoleon. In 1811, as emperor, he made Ajaccio the capital of the new Department of Corsica. The city's two main structural arteries, the north-south Cours Napoleon and the east-west Cours Grandval, both originated under his direction. The Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta on Rue Saint-Charles, built in 1582, is where Napoleon was baptized. His siblings, including Joseph Bonaparte who became King of Naples and then King of Spain, and Jérôme Bonaparte who became King of Westphalia, were also born here. The Imperial Chapel, built in 1857, now houses the graves of Napoleon's parents and his brothers and sisters. The city's airport carries his name: Ajaccio Napoleon Bonaparte Airport.

• 5. Liberation and the Juvenile Colony

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  On the 9th of September 1943, Ajaccio rose against the Nazi occupiers and became the first French town to be liberated from German domination. General Charles de Gaulle traveled to the city on the 8th of October 1943 and delivered a speech declaring that Corsica was "the first morsel of France to be liberated" and that its liberation demonstrated the intentions and will of the whole French nation. The square in front of the railway station is named after Pierre Griffi, a hero of the Corsican Resistance and a member of the first operation launched to coordinate resistance in occupied Corsica. The submarine Casabianca, commanded by Jean L'Herminier, actively participated in the liberation of Corsica in September 1943; a statue of L'Herminier stands in front of the ferry terminal.

  During the occupation, no Jew was executed or deported from Corsica, protected by its people and its government. This fact supports Corsica's aspiration to the designation "Righteous Among the Nations," a title held by no French region except the commune of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in Haute-Loire. The case was under investigation according to the source.

  A darker chapter in the city's history unfolded nearly a century earlier. In 1855, Ajaccio became the site of the first prison in France for children: the Horticultural Colony of Saint Anthony. Established under Article 10 of the Act of the 5th of August 1850, it accepted boys and girls aged 8 to 20 convicted as juvenile delinquents. Nearly 1,200 children from across France passed through it before it closed in 1866. Sixty percent of them died, killed by poor sanitation and malaria in the unhealthy areas they were made to clear.

• 6. A City of Two Layers

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  Ajaccio holds the French record for thunderstorms over the reference period 1971-2000, averaging 39 thunderstorm days per year. The area around the Parata headland is the third-driest place in metropolitan France. On the 14th of September 2009, a tornado rated F1 on the Fujita scale struck the city, overturning cars and tearing off roof tiles, though no one was killed. These extremes coexist with the Mediterranean mildness that drew wealthy English tourists to winter here in the 19th century, in the same pattern as Monaco, Cannes, and Nice. An Anglican Church was even built for them. The area called the Foreigners' Quarter still contains old palaces and villas from the Belle Époque, some of them now deteriorating.

  The city experienced a demographic surge in the 1960s driven by migration from rural areas, by French Algerians known as Pieds-Noirs, and by immigrants from the Maghreb and from mainland France. That surge explains why 85 percent of the city's dwellings were built after 1949. The skyline became divided: narrow Mediterranean streets in the old core, and concrete towers on the heights, most prominently in the neighborhood called Les Jardins de l'Empereur. The commune covers 82.03 square kilometers, but only a small strip of that, an arc along the eastern coastal zone, is densely urbanized.

  The Musée Fesch holds a large collection of Italian Renaissance paintings. The Fesch Palace on Rue Cardinal-Fesch dates to 1827 and was founded by Cardinal Joseph Fesch, born at Ajaccio in 1763. Abel Gance filmed his 1927 silent epic "Napoléon" here, one of the last successful French silent films. The Municipal Library in the north wing of the Musée Fesch holds early printed books dating back to the 14th century. The Îles Sanguinaires, the Bloody Islands, sit off the western tip of the gulf within a Natura 2000 protected area, and along the road that runs past them is the Ajaccio cemetery where Corsican singer Tino Rossi, born in 1907, is buried.