Aléria: The Greek City of Alalia

Required Activities

• Walk the excavated town on its hill and tick off the pieces: the forum and its porticoes, the temple, the nymphaeum, the shops and houses, the balneum with its mosaics, the industrial workshop and the street drains — the first complete ancient town plan ever uncovered in Corsica

• In the Fort de Matra, look for the Etruscan grave goods rather than the Roman ones: 179 Etruscan-culture tombs dated between 500 and 259 BC were opened in the 1960s and 1970s and another 130 since digging resumed in 2018, which is why Aléria counts as an Etruscan city as much as a Greek or Roman one

• Cross from the fort to the parish church of San Marcellu standing opposite it — on the best reading of the evidence a 4th- or 5th-century building and the first cathedral in Corsica, which would make it older than almost anything else standing on the island

• Eat oysters on the Étang de Diane, where the beds still straddle the Aléria and Tallone shores, and look across to the Île de Diana — Roman Aléria shipped these oysters marinated in amphorae to the senators of Rome and dumped the thousands of shells on that islet, where they still turn up in the layers

• Find the glass stele put up on 22 August 2014 near where the assault happened: on 21 August 1975 a dozen men led by Edmond Simeoni and his brother Max occupied a winegrower's farm here, and the storming of it the next day is taken as the founding act of modern Corsican nationalism