Though realising soon after arriving that the winding roads with their hairpin turns, shared by caravans, lorries, local traffic, cyclists, sheep, cows and goats alike, it took some acclimation to truly appreciate that we were not able to easily hop from location to location on the island as the safe maximum speed for most stretches of roadway along the coast was a careful and deferential thirty kilometres an hour—the speed limit was eighty but we witnessed no such attempts and were not about to try ourselves. What looked like a short excursion on the map was an all day affair, but no matter as their were plenty of sites near the campsite that required little travel and enjoyed the trip and destination of Calvi very much. The twelfth century stronghold was established with it citadel by the Genoese and successfully repelled incursions by the French and Turks before falling to Barbary pirates in the mid-sixteenth century by continued to be stronghold of support for the Republic.
During the French Revolutionary wars with Britain, Horatio Nelson captured the city with the help of Corsican nationalists—the battle which cost the admiral an eye. Calvi’s most famous son, supposedly at least since like
Charlemagne he is claimed by several modern countries though nowadays it might be preferable to disown him, is
Christopher Columbus—scholars are uncertain however and the bulk of the argument seems to lie in the fact that the explorer would have masked his birthplace because of the town’s subversive reputation.
We returned to the campsite late in the day, having travelled through the wine-growing region of the island.
