One of the quirks that results from visiting provincial towns like Ajaccio is the way that people wonder at you simply for being there. In the morning, yesterday, I sought to acquaint myself a bit with the town so I took a page of a book of tourist maps in the hotel reception and did a bit of hiking to find myself breakfast. Along the way I saw Ajaccio as a cozy town, one that did not appear to have been massively developed with the sort of tourism infrastructure one finds in more fortunate areas, a bit more unspoiled. When having lunch, my mother and I were eating salads at a place near our hotel and the person who ran the place–and whose adorable small child was there with her in the restaurant in a stroller–assumed that we were in town on the ferry, which drops off people nearby as they go to and from places like Sardinia and the southern coast of France.

Ajaccio itself is a small city of a bit more than 70,000 people or so, but it is the largest city on the entire island of Corsica and it happens to be the capital of both its department of the southern part of the island as well as a collective territory that makes up the entire island. And although the city has an airport, most of the city is based on the territory that surrounds its excellent natural port and extends to the south, where a citadel was built under Corsican rule in the 1400s. The Old Town of Ajaccio is a cozy place of low-story buildings where there are various stores, with hotels or residential property above them, where people walk throughout the day to get from one place to another while enjoying the comfortable feel of the place, or walk to and from the nearby port which periodically takes and deposits large amounts of people riding on the massive ferries or smaller tour boats which operate in the area.

As I was walking and watching the young people walk up and down the streets, I wondered how it is that people would feel about growing up in a place like this. As a child I lived near a provincial town that was considerably smaller than Ajaccio, but the general mentality was that people were from towns like this and that these were not places where one wanted to stay when one was able to leave. Ajaccio, though, in contrast to many such towns, seems to be a place where a lot of people want to go. If growth has been slow, there has been growth, with the population more than doubling since World War II, an unusual thing in a small city so far removed from places of great power and influence.

The most famous citizen of this city was, without a doubt, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, whose last name reflects the Italianate heritage of the Corsicans, who successfully have maintained their own language in the face of pressure from both Italian (when the island was under Genoan rule) and French. Unlike the case of some local boys made good, Napoleon made sure to beautify and develop his hometown and encourage its growth and there remains an important political party devoted to Bonapartist interests to this day in the area. The fact that Napoleon’s family ended up staying with their roots in the area, even if the Emperor himself was exiled first to Elba and then to lonely and remote St. Helena, gave the family continued influence in the area that they had helped to give some attention to, and both the Emperor’s own glory and the place that he left behind are well worth visiting this place for, even now.