Ajaccio

There was a town on the gulf in late antiquity: excavations on the hill of San Giovanni in 2005 uncovered the baptistery of a 6th-century cathedral, and Pope Gregory the Great mentioned the bishopric in 591 and 601. After the 8th century the settlement declined almost to nothing. On 21 April 1492 Genoa's Bank of Saint George began building a new town on the Punta della Lechia, south of the old site, with a castle at its heart. It was a Genoese colony from which Corsicans were at first excluded, but it grew quickly into the capital of the island's southern province, while Bastia remained the capital of the whole.

The French held Ajaccio from 1553 to 1559, then returned it to Genoa. When Pasquale Paoli declared the Corsican Republic in 1755, the Genoese kept the citadel, and in 1768 Genoa sold the island to France. Napoleon Bonaparte was born here on 15 August 1769; his father had been Paoli's secretary. In 1793 the Bonapartes fled to the mainland when Paolist forces burned their estate, returning in 1797. In 1811 Napoleon made Ajaccio capital of the new department of Corsica.

In the 19th century the town became a winter resort for high society, the English especially. On 9 September 1943 its people rose against the occupiers, and Corsica became the first part of France to be liberated. The population grew sharply after 1960 with migration from the villages, the arrival of pieds-noirs from Algeria and immigration from the Maghreb and the mainland. In 1998 the prefect Claude Érignac was assassinated here, and in March 2022 the town was a centre of violent unrest.

Ajaccio calls itself the imperial city, and Napoleon is everywhere: in the Maison Bonaparte, the Imperial Chapel where his mother lies, the cathedral where he was baptised, the airport named after him and the two main avenues he laid out. The town remained, with interruptions, a stronghold of the Bonapartist party until the municipal elections of 2001.

The Musée Fesch, founded by Napoleon's uncle Cardinal Fesch, holds a very important collection of Italian Renaissance painting, and gives the town a cultural weight beyond its size. Corsican is spoken alongside French, the island's flag bears a Moor's head, and paghjella polyphonic singing, listed by UNESCO, belongs to the island's culture as much as to its villages.

Football carries strong local feeling: AC Ajaccio, founded in 1910, has a long rivalry with SC Bastia in the Corsica derby, though the club now plays in the sixth tier of French football. The club's ground, known for years as the Stade François Coty, was renamed the Stade Michel-Moretti in 2024. Life is lived outdoors, around the harbour and the market in the morning and along the coast road in the evening.

The commune had about 76,000 residents in 2023, and the wider urban area about 87,000 in 2022. Most people live on a narrow, densely built arc along the eastern part of the commune, much of it in low-rise and tower blocks put up during the boom of the 1960s — 85 per cent of homes date from after 1949 — and the town spreads north and east into suburbs and up the Gravona valley.

With Bastia, Ajaccio is the island's economic, commercial and administrative centre, and services provide most jobs: the regional government and assembly, the prefecture, hospitals, shops and tourism, from beach holidays to cruise calls. Industry is small, the aeronautical firm Corsica Aerospace Composites being the largest company on the island. Housing estates in districts such as Les Cannes and Les Salines are subject to urban renewal schemes, and the hospital moved in 2023 to a new site at Stilettu on the edge of town.

Only two roads cross the town, so traffic and parking are a constant complaint, especially in summer, when tourists and cruise passengers swell the streets.

Ajaccio eats Corsican. The island's charcuterie comes from pigs that live partly in the wild and feed mainly on chestnuts: lonzu, a peppered, salted and smoked pork fillet; coppa, also called capicollu; prisuttu, ham; and figatellu, a pork-liver sausage. Brocciu, a cheese made from milk and whey, mostly of sheep's milk, goes into cannelloni and ravioli and into fiadone, a cheesecake with lemon zest.

Chestnut flour, once the island's staple, appears in cakes, fritters and pulenda, a chestnut polenta, and fish soup, made with sea or river fish, is typical. Canistrelli are biscuits flavoured with white wine or anisette. The central market on the Place Foch, with the fish hall nearby, sells cheeses, charcuterie, olives and oranges.

The Ajaccio wine appellation, once called Coteaux d'Ajaccio and a separate AOC since 1984, covers vineyards overlooking the sea and is one of the oldest wine traditions on the island; its signature grape is Sciaccarellu. Myrtle liqueur and the aperitif Cap Corse Mattei are well-known island drinks.