Word: ajaccio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...traversed only by a Toonerville-style railroad, the Micheline, which looks out on ruined citadels, deserted villages and scarred forests. Once rich in timber (pine, chestnut, cork trees), Corsica has been hard-hit by forest fires. Population has drained from 300,000 in the 1870s to 170,000 today. Ajaccio, the capital, is a cluster of quaint but quaking buildings, though a scattering of new apartments is rising beyond the old perimeter...
...Island of Corsica is notorious for its ill-tempered Cap Corse aperitifs, its vile figatelli sausage, and Napoleon, who left it as soon as he could. It is not known for art; yet the capital of Ajaccio (pop. 32,000) has a rich remnant of what was once one of Europe's greatest collections. Ajaccio used to think that the thousand paintings in the municipal museum were fakes, but the late Bernard Berenson disproved that judgment in 1959. Now the collection is becoming a focus of European art interest...
Fesch once guessed that he owned 30,000 art works. He bequeathed 1,000 of them to a "study museum" in Ajaccio. The museum is still too small to show more than a fourth of the collection at a time, and there is no accurate catalogue for the Botticellis, Bellinis and Lorenzo di Credis that vie for wall space. Nevertheless it is, indirectly, the best thing Napoleon ever did for Corsica...
...became Emperor, he felt it necessary to suggest that the Bonapartes had been the Bourbons of Corsica, a claim that greatly amused his niece, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte. "If it had not been for Napoleon's armies," she once confessed, "I would be selling oranges on the quayside at Ajaccio...
...Anouchka von Meks, 19, pert French-bred daughter of a German clothier, went briefly on the rocks. Bound for Sardinia in Karim's 15 ton cabin cruiser Taara, the pair suddenly found themselves lodged high and wet on a well-marked reef near Corsica's Gulf of Ajaccio. After the Taara was towed ashore, the Harvard-educated prince was informed by a local yachtsman that a French naval yard near by had facilities to repair the boat's mashed propellers, "but they won't help you because it's a military base." Karim...