There’s something contrarian about Corsica, the fourth-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea. Seen from above, it resembles a hand with its index finger raised in defiance — the digit in question being the Cap Corse, a rugged peninsula of dark green mountains, bobbing fishing boats and beaches like Plage de Barcaggio, untouched by human development and famed for its herd of sunbathing cows.

Corsica’s story is one of fierce resistance in the face of repeated attacks and colonisation, and the longer you spend on the island the more the headstrong spirit of the Corsican people reveals itself — and the more its apparent paradoxes seem to unfold.

“Corsica, for most of its history, was an island that was afraid of the sea,” says guide Catherine Lehmann as we navigate the coastal capital, Ajaccio, through honeyed stone streets and squares where old men play pétanque in the shade of plane trees. “Pirates, invasions and malaria — that’s what the coast traditionally meant to Corsicans. In 1769, when Napoleon was born here, Ajaccio was nothing.”

We walk from the city’s coral-hued Renaissance cathedral up a leafy hillside boulevard to an imperious statue of Corsica’s most famous son, Napoleon Bonaparte, gazing out over Ajaccio to the sapphire-blue Mediterranean Sea. The statue projects the same image as countless paintings and films have over the past 250 years: a stout man in riding boots and an overcoat, one hand tucked inside his waistcoat, steely eyes staring from beneath a bicorn hat.

“He looked very Corsican. Short, slumped shoulders, but very intense and self-confident,” says Catherine. A Corsican herself, she shares some of his features — she’s small but resolute, her olive skin offset by grey-blue eyes, which are surprisingly common on Corsica. In personality, too, Catherine says, Napoleon reflected the obdurate spirit of his homeland. “Even today, children are raised like warriors here,” she remarks. “In France, if a kid gets bullied at school, their parents tell them to tell the teacher. Here, we tell them to punch the bully back. Be a Corsican. Not a chicken.”

Corsica’s strategic position between France and Italy has long made it a target for occupying outsiders, from the Romans, Greeks and Carthaginians of the ancient world to the modern governors — or colonisers, as many Corsicans still see them: the French. So while it’s fitting in a way that Corsica’s most famous son should be a militaristic outsider like Napoleon, reception to him in Corsica itself is mixed. Not only is he the embodiment of French imperialism, but as ruler of France, he’s widely believed to have neglected his Corsican homeland. The view, however, is different in Ajaccio, which he transformed from a coastal backwater into a capital city. “Here we have a much more positive view of Napoleon than elsewhere in Corsica,” says Catherine as we stroll along the harbour, its swaying palms and gleaming yachts like a vision of the Côte d’Azur. “And we feel more French.”

To discover the Corsican spirit in its most distilled form, I’m heading inland, where medieval hilltop villages rest in blankets of cloud, and hairpin roads wind through mutated outcrops of granite that erupt like popped corn from swathes of cool, thick forest. As I drive, the fragrance of the maquis — the herby shrubland that defines the Corsican interior — floods in through my open window. The aroma of rosemary, sage and the curry-like smell of immortelle, a yellow flower used in some of the world’s most expensive fragrances, mingle together in a glorious melange. Corsica is a perfumed isle; a wistful Napoleon, during his final exile on the remote Atlantic island of Saint Helena, is said to have spoken longingly of the scent of his homeland.

The serenity is shattered periodically: by death-wish drivers overtaking me on blind corners and, more subtly, by damage to the road signs — in the form of spray paint or bullet holes — erasing the French translations of the Corsican-language place names. The pointed vandalism serves as evidence of abiding discontent with the status quo. Corsica’s political climate remains fraught. Although calls for outright independence from France are no longer mainstream, the movement for greater autonomy remains strong and occasionally spills over into violent protest, most recently in 2022.

An hour-and-a-half’s drive from Ajaccio, the town of Corte reveals itself: a picture-book huddle of medieval houses set on a hilltop citadel that rises imposingly above the maquis. Corte was the capital of the short-lived Corsican Republic — declared an independent state in 1755 by Pasquale Paoli, who sought to liberate Corsica from its ruler at the time, the Republic of Genoa. The Corsican Republic fell when the island was taken over by France in 1769 — the year of Napoleon’s birth — but to this day it’s Paoli, far more than Napoleon, who’s Corsica’s national hero. Besides his fierce battle for Corsican independence, Paoli was a liberaliser and innovator; his Corsican Constitution was the world’s first written constitution, and incorporated democratic principles including female suffrage.

I sit at a cafe in the town square and order a clementine juice — a Corsican speciality — in the shadow of a defiant statue of Jean-Pierre Gaffori, a hero of Paoli’s revolutionary movement, who was assassinated in 1750. The building behind him, his former home, is still riddled with bullet holes; above his head, the Corsican flag flaps in the breeze. Like neighbouring Sardinia’s, the flag depicts a Moor’s head, a legacy of Corsica’s time as a territory of the Spanish kings of Aragon. On pre-revolutionary flags the Moor was blindfolded; legend has it that Paoli ordered the bandana to be lifted onto his forehead to symbolise the awakening of the Corsican people.

After another 90-minute drive, I reach my final destination for the day: the home (and holiday cottages) of musician Christian Andreani, in the village of Patrimonio. In the garden, in the shade of an age-thickened chestnut tree, Christian — a short, white-bearded man in glasses and a denim jacket — lays out a selection of ancient Corsican instruments.

There are several extravagantly curved sheep horns, an array of wooden recorders and a flute made from a goat’s leg bone. This latter instrument, Christian says, is similar to ones used by Corsica’s mysterious prehistoric people, about whom little is known beyond the stone menhirs, or standing stones, they left behind. They bear millennia-old carvings of human figures that stand, open-mouthed, frozen as if awestruck by some higher power. Thousands of these figures still scatter the maquis; some stand proud in lonely groves, looking like they were carved yesterday; others lie face-down, cracked and strangled with ivy, waiting to be resurrected.

Christian can often be found playing his instruments alone in the mountains, his only accompaniment the burbling of a stream and the tinkle of mule bells. “It’s a rapport with the land and with the cosmos,” he says, before picking up a huge conch shell and brandishing it with a raised fist. “But this,” he says, “is the sound of revolution.” He blows a bellowing note that sends birds scattering from the branches and threatens to rain a harvest of chestnuts down on our heads. “Pasquale Paoli and his troops would blow these shells as a battle cry and to communicate across different valleys,” he says.

Although Christian’s instruments hark back to a time out of mind, the tunes he plays on them are Corsican folk songs, a genre that’s undergone a renaissance in the past 50 years or so. “We call it the Riacquistu — the reacquisition,” he says. From the 1970s onwards, Christian explains, the Corsican nationalism movement empowered islanders to rediscover the country’s unique cultural elements: its Italianate language, long suppressed by the French authorities; winemaking; and folk music. Echoes of the Riacquistu are everywhere here. That very morning, I’d come down for breakfast in my gîte to find the proprietor playing a YouTube video entitled ‘One hour of Corsican rebel/combat folk music’, humming along between sips of his cafe au lait. These days, not everybody agrees with the methods of the more militant Corsican rebels, but many of these characters have nonetheless gained a place in the collective consciousness as folk heroes. For Christian, though, Corsican national pride doesn’t disturb the harmony of present-day Patrimonio. “This is a peaceful place now,” he says, before leaning in and adding with a conspiratorial whisper, “there’s even a Frenchman in the village.”

Christian soon has a chance to showcase Patrimonio’s community spirit. There’s a musical performance taking place tonight at the San Martinu Church in the village, an imposing structure that looks, with its pockmarked walls and rugged stonework, almost as old as the prehistoric monoliths strewn across the Corsican hinterland. The church is dedicated to Saint Martin of Tours, a fourth-century Roman soldier-turned-monk whose travels inspired the new island-wide Saint Martin Pilgrimage Trail, a walking route that’s been opening in stages since 2024.

I enter the church as it’s getting dark. Christian and a dozen or so other men take to the stage, dressed in grey cassocks, and deliver a rousing set of hymns, their voices coalescing in deep, rich harmony. After the performance, I get chatting to the person next to me on the pew: a smiling, grey-bearded man named Ange Torre. He’s a musician, he tells me, and fronts the band Eppò, which combines rock with traditional Corsican folk music. He gives me a blast of one of their songs through his phone. It’s a riotous blend of acoustic guitars, bass, drums and the polyphonic singing traditional to the Corsican countryside, all delivered passionately in the Corsican language.

Ange acknowledges the influence and importance of the Riacquistu, but says his band initially faced opposition from some purists within the movement. “A lot of people asked how we could mix traditional Corsican music with rock — they thought we were crazy,” he says. He’s also on a mission to upend the atmosphere of the nationalist movement itself, and restore some joy to Corsican music. “A lot of the music right now is sad or angry about the fight for independence, the injustice, the people that were killed or put in prison,” Ange explains. “But many of us just want to dance. Nowadays that can seem quite radical — but people need joy.”

The following morning, I take a walk on a forest trail outside Patrimonio through stands of chestnut and pine trees. While showing me around his garden the previous day, Christian had told me that he viewed its most ancient trees as totems. This idea of the totemic power of nature abides in rural Corsica, alongside a deeply rooted belief in a spirit world that exists with and influences our own, unseen to most, but not all. I’d read and heard whisperings about white witches, called signadoras, expert herbalists who purport to have the power to neutralise the evil eye, traditionally feared in Corsica and in cultures across the Mediterranean. I never expected to meet a signadora, but Christian tells me he knows one: a woman called Francesca Desideri. I drive back through the maquis to meet her in the village of Querciolo.

Francesca greets me in her garden, outside a log cabin that serves as her kitchen and workspace. She’s elderly, white-haired and has a deeply lined face, but is still sturdy and strong from a life outdoors, picking plants in the maquis. Her eyes are electric blue, bejewelling her eye sockets like semi-precious stones. We take a seat in the workshop, which appears untouched by the passing of centuries. Scythes and bundles of dried herbs hang on the wall, and a black-and-white cat peers nervously around an ancient-looking stove.

On the table is a ceramic bowl full of water and a stoppered bottle of olive oil. Francesca motions for me to place my hand on one side of the bowl, then drips three drops of oil into the water, muttering incantations as she does so. These secret prayers, she tells me later, invoke the Virgin Mary — a Christian element absorbed into a pagan tradition to avoid having it stamped out by the Church. “Christianity came to Corsica very late,” Francesca says.

She repeats the oil-and-water process three times, and says that with each repetition, the behaviour of the oil changes, no longer scattering but joining together as one blob — a sure sign that any trace of the evil eye has been cast out. I can’t tell much difference, but Francesca seems satisfied.

Not all of Corsica’s mystical inhabitants are a benign as the signadoras. Francesca tells me that most Corsican villages are home to people known as mazzere, who claim to enter the spiritual plane in their sleep and all have the same dream: that they’re hunting in the maquis, where they kill a wild boar. They then turn over the animal’s dead body to see the face of someone in the village, who’ll be the next person to die in the waking world.

These dream-hunters, Francesca says, are bestowed with their powers against their will, and are feared and ostracised in their villages as prophets of death. “So although I know some,” she says, sharply, “they won’t want to talk to you.”

The final stop on my journey is Bonifacio. The town is split between a somnolent harbour, where little fishing skiffs bob next to expensive pleasure boats, and a grand hilltop citadel. From here, there are sweeping views over the glittering Strait of Bonifacio and the coast of Sardinia, just 10 miles to the south. On both levels, the buildings are handsome, centuries old and hewn from amber stone.

As it happens, my visit coincides with De Renava contemporary art biennale, which is held in Bonifacio and runs from May to November. The event is hosted in spaces across town, but primarily in a vast, crumbling 19th-century building in the heart of the citadel that was formerly an army barracks.

I pull up outside and am greeted by De Renava’s co-founder, Dumè Marcellesi. He’s a colourful character: a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early 30s, with wild curly hair and a moustache. He shows me around the gallery and I’m a little surprised, in a trendy Corsican contemporary art space, to find the opening room dominated by a huge oil painting of Napoleon Bonaparte, dressed in his coronation furs. It soon becomes clear, though, that this is a subversive statement. “To some people he’s still a hero; here on Corsica he’s a villain,” says Dumè. “The theme of the biennale is ‘The Fall of Empires’. You English are specialists in the subject, of course,” he adds with a grin. Dumè signals to a tawdry souvenir vase, emblazoned with Napoleon’s image, which sits on a plinth beside the painting. “This is the modern legacy of Napoleon: cheap tat and tourist marketing,” he remarks.

In a previous life, Dumè tells me, he was an investment banker in Paris and a professional rugby player for Stade Français. But during the pandemic he gave up the city life and moved back to the countryside near Bonifacio to take over his parents’ farm, producing olives and cheese and becoming a mogul of Corsica’s contemporary art scene. “In the past, the French government made Corsicans believe that they had to move to France to become successful,” he says. “But since the Riacquistu, that’s all changed. Recent generations of Corsicans have been empowered to stay, or come back and become successful here. Corsica is no longer a cage.” In spite of which, he adds, in typically iconoclastic Corsican fashion, “The Riacquistu is dead. It was a reaction — what we need now is some action.” Dumè’s worry, he says, is that the movement to reposition Corsica’s role within France plays down the island’s merits. “We need to stop defining ourselves by the past, be happy with what we are and focus on what we can do ourselves.”

Dumè’s aim with De Renava, he says, is to prove that Corsican artists can stand up alongside better-known international names. Between sketches by Jean-Michel Basquiat and a film by acclaimed Egyptian artist Youssef Nabil is an installation by Corsican artist Yan Leandri: an array of flickering TVs play footage from the 1980s and ’90s, when nationalist violence was at its peak. On a wall outside, unrelated to the exhibition, is a stencil of Yvan Colonna, a Corsican nationalist who repeatedly maintained his innocence after being controversially jailed for the 1998 murder of Corsica’s highest-ranking official, Claude Érignac. Colonna was himself murdered in jail by a fellow inmate in 2022 and has since become a symbol of the modern nationalist movement. Stencils like this can be seen sprayed on walls across the island. “The villain became a hero,” Dumè says. “And so the cycle goes on.”