BASTIA
The third of the Genoese colonies in Corsica, St. Florent, we shall
pass over without further mention. The fourth, Bastia, was at one time
the capital, and is still the chief commercial town of the island. In
its earlier days, when it was only an unimportant fishing village, it
was known by another name. But in 1380 a strong fort was built here,
and from the word “bastille,” which means a “fort,” the name of Bastia
was obtained. Under the Genoese Bastia became a very important place,
and contained the residence of the Governor. Although it was strongly
fortified, yet it was captured and recaptured more than once. Like
Calvi, it is associated with some of the deeds of Nelson. Nelson was
very anxious to take Bastia from its French possessors, and he tried
hard for a long time to get the commander of the English soldiers to
lend him some assistance. But the military leader was timid, and very
slow in making up his mind. Nelson, lying off Bastia at the time, wrote
to his wife: “If I had carried with me 500 troops, to a certainty I
should have stormed the town, and I believe it might have been carried.
Armies go so slow that seamen think they never mean to go forward.” At
last, however, he had his way, and troops and seamen were landed to
attack the fort. After a short but fierce bombardment, the French flag
was hauled down and the British colours were run aloft. Nelson says it
was “the most glorious sight that an Englishman could experience, and
which I believe none but an Englishman could bring about. Four thousand
five hundred men laying down their arms to less than 1,000 British
soldiers who were serving as marines.” During this attack Nelson was
wounded in the back.
In Bastia we can see many excellent examples of the Corsican method of
building houses. The houses are very tall, and consist of a huge number
of flats, with one or more families in every flat. When a Corsican
builds a house, he never thinks of occupying the whole of it himself.
He lives on the third or fourth floor, and lets the rest of the
building out to other tenants. On the ground-floor there is probably a
shop. On the top-floor there will be a washerwoman or a gardener. The
higher you live, the less rent you have to pay, so that many different
classes of society are often gathered together under the same roof.
Sometimes the various stories are not let for rent, but are sold
outright, and in that case there may be as many landlords as there
are flats. In Bastia some of these tall, dirty houses contain over 500
people. They are rarely less than five to six stories high, and from
six to nine windows broad. It is just the same in Calvi, Bonifacio, and
the other Corsican towns. Even in the villages a man rarely has a whole
house to himself. Every room in every flat is about as dirty as it can
well manage to be, owing to the lack of a proper water-supply. The
only clean thing in the houses, and to the credit of the peasant let
it be mentioned, is the bed-linen; that is always as spotless as the
visitor could desire. In the rooms there is but little furniture of any
kind; in the poorest houses there is often an insufficient supply of
beds, and the men-folk sleep on the floor in the clothes they have worn
all day long. The kitchen contains small stoves, which are used for
cooking; when the cooking is finished, the fire is allowed to go out.
Only very rarely are fires used for warmth; the houses are therefore
cold and uncomfortable, and as each room has a number of doors that
never fit, they are very draughty. The floors are usually of tiles,
or even of the bare earth; wooden floors are not common; the chimneys
generally smoke. To get from one story to the next, stone staircases
are employed. The only light they obtain comes from openings pierced
in the outer walls. As the stairs belong to everybody in general, and
therefore to nobody in particular, they are rarely repaired, and are
rather dangerous to those who are not used to them. A description
of a house in Ajaccio, written by a lady who has travelled much in
Corsica, will serve to give an idea of many of the dwellings occupied
by the poor: “The house consisted of two tiny chambers, the inner one
a mere cupboard some 8 by 10 feet, which only received light from the
outer room by the communicating door; this acted as bedroom and kitchen
combined. On the narrow bed lay four loaves; a small kitchen range and
a table crammed with cooking-pots left scarcely space to turn round.
In the bigger room stood two beds, on one of which lay what at first
sight we took for a crumpled patchwork quilt, but which turned out to
be a sick grandmother swathed in rags. The table was occupied by some
artichokes and a basket of small fish. A couple of chairs stood on
the uncarpeted plank floor, and the only other articles in the room
were the lamps, some vases of paper flowers, and the inevitable family
photographs upon the mantel-piece.... In this unlovely home live an old
woman, her daughter and granddaughter, with the occasional additional
presence of the grandson, a young fisherman, who occupied the kitchen
during his brief home-comings, his mother and sister then sharing a bed
in the next room.”[A]
[A] “Through Corsica with a Camera.”--D’Este.
Most of these high houses surround a central court. The system of
drainage is bad. All the refuse is got rid of by the simple plan of
pouring it into a number of earthenware pipes which are so arranged
that the open ends of the pipes are under the several windows of the
house. When the occupants are in a hurry, they throw all the rubbish
into the courtyard below, and leave it there to rot. The odours are
indescribable, and one wonders how the people find it possible to live
amongst them.
The chief things noticeable in all places, large or small, where the
Corsican lives are always dirt and smells. The shutters of the houses
are broken, the paint on the woodwork is blistered, the plaster is
peeling off the walls, and ugly stains disfigure the ancient whitewash.
The family washing is hung on lines between the different houses, and
there is usually so much of it that the visitor is left bewildered as
to why a people who are so uncleanly as regards their bodies and their
houses should take the trouble to wash their clothes.
In Bastia there are two towns, an old and a new. The new is certainly
at the present time a little cleaner than the old, but given sufficient
time, it will surely become equally unpleasant to the nose. In the new
town stands a statue of Napoleon, looking dreamily away across the
harbour to that little island of Elba, where he spent a period of short
exile from France. As someone has remarked, the stone figure seems to
be saying, “How could you expect that little island to hold me?”
[Illustration: OLD HOUSES, BASTIA.]
It is to the new town that the ships come that carry the produce of
the island to other lands. The quays are always busy and crowded,
and people have to pick their way amongst piles of cork, stacks of
wine-bottles, casks of olive-oil, and loads of charcoal.