The road continues to descend towards Ajaccio. At length we descried the magnificent gulf. It was about five o'clock in the afternoon when we gained the neighbourhood of the city. The richer cultivation of the heights, vineyards, and olive-orchards, and the fertile plain of Campoloro, announced the vicinity of the capital of Corsica. It showed itself as a row of white houses stretching into the gulf, at the foot of a range of hills, and surrounded by villas. Through the avenue of elms, which leads along the gulf into the town, I now, with joyous emotion, entered the little native city of the man who convulsed the world.
BOOK VIII.—WANDERINGS IN CORSICA.
CHAPTER I.
AJACCIO.
Ajaccio lies at the northern end of one of the most magnificent gulfs in the world. The lines of its two opposite coasts are of unequal length. The northern is the shorter; it runs out in a westerly direction to the Punta della Parata, off which lie the Isole Sanguinarie, or Bloody Islands. The southern side of the gulf stretches from north to south in a long and very irregular line to Cape Muro, on rounding which you enter the Bay of Valinco.
No villages are seen on the northern shore; on the southern but few, with here and there a solitary tower or a lighthouse. Lofty hills rise over the northern end of the beautiful gulf; at their base lies the valley of the Gravone, ending towards the sea in the fertile plain of Campo di Loro. The situation of Ajaccio has an astonishing resemblance to that of Naples.
It is said that Ajaccio is one of the oldest cities in Corsica. According to the fable of some chroniclers, it derives its name from the Telamonian Ajax; according to others, it was founded by Agazzo, the son of the Trojan prince Corso, who wandered with Æneas into the western Mediterranean, carried off Sica, the niece of Dido, and thus gave the island the name of Corsica. Ptolemy places the ancient city of Urcinium on the Gulf of Ajaccio, supposed to be the Adjacium of the earliest period of the Middle Ages, a town which is always mentioned along with the oldest in the island—with Aleria, Mariana, Nebium, and Sagona, cities which now no longer exist.
The ancient Ajaccio, however, did not occupy the site of the present town; it lay on an eminence farther to the north. The hill is called San Giovanni; on its summit lie the ruins of an old castle, named Castello Vecchio, and there formerly lay near them the remains of an ancient cathedral, in which it was customary for the bishops of Ajaccio to be consecrated, long after it had fallen into decay. These ruins have vanished; nothing now betrays the former existence of a city on this spot. But many ancient Roman coins have been found in the vineyards; also oval-shaped sarcophagi of terracotta, always containing a skeleton and a key. It is said that the vaulted tombs of the Moorish kings were also formerly shown here; but they have disappeared.
The new town and the citadel were founded by the Bank of St. George of Genoa in the year 1492. It was the residence of a lieutenant of the Governor of Bastia, and did not become the capital of the island till the year 1811, when it was elevated to its new dignity at the instance of Madame Letitia and Cardinal Fesch, who wished in this way to give distinction to their own and the Emperor's birthplace.
The best view of the town and its environs is from the hill of San Giovanni. It presents one of the prettiest pictures that can be imagined, and is equalled by no other city in Corsica. The distance is incomparable. Cloud-topped hills stretching far into the interior, the majestic gulf in azure splendour, an Italian vegetation and a southern sky—no finer combination could be thought of; and here in the midst of it lies a quite idyllic, silent, innocent little town of 11,500 inhabitants, concealed among the verdure of its elms, the mistress of a region which seems intended to be the environment of one of the capitals of the world.