Author: Greg Roensch

We’re hanging out for a long weekend in Bastia, the second biggest city in Corsica. Our hotel, A Casa Reale, is on the second floor of a building dating back to 1700. Napoleon once stayed here. Flaubert once dined here. Yes, that’s how we roll.

The hotel is beautifully renovated, though every piece of furniture, except maybe the coffee machine and the toaster, are relics of bygone eras. The piano in the common room looks like something Mozart might have played (if he ever came to Corsica). Everything about this place oozes history, except for the plumbing, thankfully.

A Casa Reale is in the old town, thirty minutes from the airport. Our taxi driver gestured toward the horizon at one point to tell us we could see Elba on a clearer day. He also apologized for the traffic and for driving us through an ugly industrial area. “We’ll arrive somewhere nice soon,” he assured RL in French.

When learning where we’re from, he erupted with a massive “Sannnnn Frannnnnciscooooo,” sounding like something a soccer play-by-play commentator might howl when his team scores a World-Cup-winning goal.

Upon arriving at Flaubert’s hotel (that’s what I’m calling it now), we uncorked the complimentary bottle of Corsican wine and gazed out at the view of the port from our room. For dinner, we found our way to a restaurant called Grazie Mille. I’m no foodie, but the pistachio-encrusted sea bass with limoncello-soaked orange slices was fricking amazing.

Praise be to Neptune that we were inside the restaurant when a prodigious hailstorm began to pelt the cobblestones where Flaubert and Napoleon once walked. Grazie mille, indeed.

It’s morning now. The rain is gone, and I’m sitting on the terrace at A Casa Reale, watching a ferry depart for Sardinia. A church bell signals the hour, power tools chip away at the concrete at a nearby renovation, children laugh and play on the narrow street below, and the wind whips off the Tyrrhenian Sea, causing the clothes hanging from a line on a building across the way to flutter and dance.

Our first stop today will be the tourist office to figure out a plan for the next three days, though I’m happy to sit here and watch the clothes dry in the sun.