L'Île-Rousse: Paoli's Port on the Red Rocks

Required Activities

• Walk the port road out onto the Pietra — an island until the mid-19th-century rock infill made it a peninsula — to the lighthouse and the 16th-century Genoese tower, and stand on the west side in the wind to see what the rock does: it screens the prevailing westerlies, and that shelter is the only reason a port could be put here

• From the Pietra, count the archipelago off: Saletta on its bridge, the three rocks of E Trè Petre carrying the port jetty, Isula Grande under your feet, Rucciu and Isula Piana east of the lighthouse and little Ruccettu west of it — eight islets of red porphyry, and the town is named after their colour

• Find Paoli's bust on the square named after him, under plane trees more than a hundred years old and facing the church of the Immaculate Conception with its date palms planted in 1890, then walk the grid out from it — narrow straight streets running north to south to the sea, exactly as Salvini drew them

• Swim off Marinella, the white sand strip running east from the town centre, and come back on U Trinighellu, the summer 'tramway des plages' that stops at the beach and runs the whole coast to Calvi — leave the van where it is

• Buy something in the covered market and count the columns holding its roof up — there are twenty-one, and it is the one building in the old town that still does the job Paoli built the town to do