We were not aware then, what we learnt later on, how necessary a thing it is in Corsica to telegraph one's coming beforehand. It insures a good dinner; and, at any rate, a room swept out to a certain degree.
You pay a penny a word for telegraphic messages, and there is scarcely a village in the country without its office. Without a telegram, you may arrive to find no rooms, or, what is almost as bad, to be placed in rooms out of which the family have kindly turned for your accommodation. We soon learnt by experience to have a perfect horror of these "family rooms."
The accumulated garments of the family lie about in all directions, your jug and basin are even more lilliputian than elsewhere, your bed quilt is grimy (they do not often supply you with blankets in Corsica), and the apartment appears, from its fugginess, never to have known the luxury of open windows.
A gun also occasionally peeps at you from a corner, and a pistol from the mantle-piece; and the family run in at all hours for their blacking brushes, their best boots, or a bottle of vin ordinaire on the top of the household chest: but these are small matters.
Very beautiful looked the sea, lapping against the walls of the houses, and scattering spray over the red rocks, at 6 a.m. next morning; but in an hour it had clouded over, and sea and sky and rocks were all leaden grey in a lowering thunderstorm. At nine o'clock, however, it cleared up a little, and we started for Calvi, passing through green meadows and cultivated land to the summit of a mountain, and down again to the village of Algajola by the sea shore. Loving maquis clothed the limestone hills as we ascended again, looking beyond the grey crags, covered with soft green moss or scarlet leeks, to the village and ancient castle of Lumio. Long before we reached them, the snow mountains were raising white heads over the green hills before us; and as we paused on the summit of the second pass, the full view of the magnificent bay of Calvi burst upon us, sweeping out as far as the eye could reach, and glowing in the midday sun.
Figs, lemons, and prickly pear bordered our road as we descended through rocky hills to the long narrow level tract preceding Calvi; and, all the way, the wide blue sea beckoned on one side to the solemn range of snowy Alps upon the other.
It is impossible to describe the exceeding picturesqueness of the town and citadel as you approach from this road. Calvi lies upon a peninsula of high ground jutting out into the sea, and consists of two distinct towns—the lower, at the water's edge; and the upper, which comprises the citadel, built upon the hill.
The citadel, with the exception of Bonifacio, is the strongest in the island. Its bastion walls are of an immense height, gleaming white against the blue sky, and their thickness and impregnability are equal to their height. Nine or ten times have these bastion walls been assailed by foes of every nation, including the English, wearing out the very heart of the foe by their stern resistance, and often finally foiling his most determined efforts.
Planted upon inaccessible rocks commanding the sea, and formed by the very nature of its position for defence, the Genoese at an early date (about the fourteenth century) fortified it thus strongly; and although sometimes losing it for a while, yet managed to keep it in their hands for long centuries. Bonifacio and Calvi, both to a certain degree colonized by Genoese families, and filled with Genoese soldiers, were for many years the main, and often the only, cords by which this cruel and tyrannical government held on to unfortunate Corsica.
In the year 1735, a romantic little incident occurred upon this coast. It was towards the conclusion of one of the innumerable Corsican struggles against Genoese despotism, when, in the hopeless but undying cause of liberty, the blood of the islanders had been shed with an unwearied devotion and unassisted heroism that at last moved the heart of the practical but freedom-loving Briton to a sudden burst of sympathetic feeling. It would be a pity to tell the story in any other words but those of Gregorovius.