Vendettas, nuraghi and the marches: Bastia by day

We park our motorhome for a few days and take a break from driving. After the High Alps and the Haute Provence we deserve it. We take the train to Bastia from our campground. This station has to be seen to be believed. We walk about 100 steps from the beach up a set of concrete steps, cut into a scruffy unmowed hill. At the top there is a slab of flat concrete resting on pebbles. About a metre wide and two metres long. That is our station. It has no name, no light, no facilities whatsoever. It is surrounded by crusty unkempt overgrown grass, building debris and other detritus that no one in Corsica thinks looks unsightly, so not a soul ever bothers to move it.

We are to wave down the train. If it sees us it stops is the advice. There is a printed schedule, but that is as flexible as the driver's mood. And they stick to it if they feel so inclined, it appears. The trains are two rail motors long: unkempt, uncared for and have no Stop buttons to push to alert the driver that you might need to get off.

Smart people learn to sit close to the front of the engine so they can alert the driver, and if it suits his mood he will offload them at the next stop. Luckily they appear to look on us as obliging, and kindly pretend to understand our grimaces, gestures and grotesque French.

Bastia feels a little like Crete, a lot like coastal parts of Italy, and only a tiny bit like France -- French, now, though it is. But only for the last two centuries. Before that, Corsica was under Pisan then Genovese rule, so, historically, it has a longer connection with Italy and that shows still, in its architecture and its language, which is harsher and more clipped to my ear than the lyrical French.

Over the centuries trade ships have loaded themselves to the hilt with wine from Corsican terraces, cork from its hinterland trees, and masses of island timber borne away as firewood.

The Old Port and the ancient medieval Citadelle built by the Genoese governers who ran the area look very Italian. Fishermen still fold their shabby nets beside expensive tourist yachts.

The churches and cathedrals are all rather excessive: lots of baroque curliques, dripping chandeliers and vaults weighty with gilded decor. One had rich red velvet walls which Bec thought looked more like a circus, or a brothel, than a church.

Archaic buildings rise out of the rockface, unadorned, other than with a thin coating of coarse stucco. Others have that pastel-soft coating of faded scrubbed paint over the stucco that is all over Mediterranean buildings. Lots of shabby pink, blotchy ochre and stained cream. I love it.

And everywhere there are restaurants, along the old port, the new port, where the ferries come in with traffic-choking regularity, and in the larger squares, dotted high in the old town and low the new. If there was a population to fill all the dining tables and chairs that are set for meals the whole town would have to come to a standstill. Already in May the traffic is monstrous.

I think I heard somewhere that the population year round in all of Corsica is only a quarter of a million total, but five times that number returns to Corsica each year to serve the summer trade. A lot like the Greek islands, which virtually open at Easter and close in October. If the summer throngs here get more clogged than this we would not want to be here.

Our motorhome is parked in an idyllic spot with a million dollar sea view, with the ocean just steps away, a bar and a restaurant closer even than the loos and showers and amusing petanque games to puzzle over under shady plane trees as the afternoon shadows grow long. The train is barely a short walk up a few stairs to town where there are chic and shabby shops, including one, Maison Mattel that is like walking into history. This is my idea of a heavenly spot in which to have a vacation. It is going to be hard to get me to move from here. But enough people is enough: I want no more than now.

oooOOOooo