Corsica II: Cinturi and St Florent

The drive across Cap Corse and down the west coast is slow - not just because of the narrow winding roads, but because you want to stop at every picturesque village and beautiful undeveloped hillside or coast.  Which is to say, everywhere.  The fishing port of Cinturi was one stop on the way, where we lingered long enough for a quick sketch of the boats in the harbour, and the actual Cinturi, a hillside village, way above it.  This is a common set-up - the main village far above the port.  We wondered why - pirates?

St Florent is a bigger town, popular with the yachting set (one harbourside restaurant cleverly offered delivery to your boat), but very quiet in the still-perfect days of early autumn.  The main event in town is the 5 o'clock gathering of older men to play bocce/petanque/boules in the tree-lined piazza dedicated to the purpose.  The same thing happens at the same time in every settlement with a male population of 4 or more throughout Corsica.

The area also has large nature reserves and beautiful swimming beaches.  I tried a quick paint-only sketch of the outrageous colours in one bay - not very successful, and not helped much by the addition of some water-soluble blue ink.  I blame a long hike in the sun, plus lack of practice.  There must be some kind of Canada Council grant I could get to work on my sketching of remote Mediterranean beaches...

Corsica I: Bastia and Cap Corse

For people used to BC Ferries, the ferry to Corsica was ... different.  Think restaurants with waiters, lounges with armchairs and brass fittings, reclining deck chairs, a pool.  It was a re-purposed cruise ship, so now I can check "Go on a cruise" off my bucket list (where it occupied one of the bottom-most positions).  We cruised past Capraia Isola, Island of Goatherdesses, on the way - one of several sparsely inhabited isolated Mediterranean Islands that very few people have ever heard of.

Bastia is a main town on Corsica, but still small.  We walked across half of it and back in the two and a half hours that the rental car agency was closed for lunch.  We toured the old town and had lunch in the plaza of the citadel, where this old palace had two clocks - an original sundial that was perfectly accurate (except not programmed to change to daylight savings time), and a more modern mechanical clock that was broken.

When we got the car - a fearsome Citroen Berlingo - we made our way towards the north end of Cap Corse, and were quickly winding along mostly undeveloped coast, with little villages above on the treed slopes, and almost no one on the roads.  And that's the way it would stay for our entire trip around the north half of the island - relentlessly curvy roads, large areas of wild maquis scrubland, forest and alpine, scattered ancient villages, and more pigs and goats than cars on the roads.  We hiked for over three hours around a nature reserve and several beaches the next morning, following the Sentier des Douaniers on the north end of the island, and saw precisely 0 other people.  This guard tower is one of a series that ring the island.  They were built to warn of pirate attacks, apparently the bane of Corsicans for several centuries.  The watchmen lit a fire on the tower when pirates sailed over the horizon, and the signal was taken up by adjacent towers, spreading the message around the whole island in a couple of hours.  It was the Twitter of its time.

   

Cinque Terre II, and Livorno

Hiking between the isolated villages is a main attraction in Cinque Terre.  With the steep terrain and a couple of trails closed because of landslides, some of the hikes are quite strenuous (= more than half a Grouse Grind, for Vancouverites).  But they give great views of the coast and the villages before you descend down to them.

The villages were once all about fishing.  I think there is still some of that, but now the boats mostly transfer train-weary tourists from one village to another, and serve as props for sketchers.

We were lucky enough to be there when there was a storm somewhere over the Mediterranean.  We had calm and sunny skies, but there were big waves breaking over the piers and the rocks at the base of the cliffs.  We went to Riomaggiore, the southern-most village, and had a glass of wine in a cafe right on the edge of the coastal cliffs with the crashing surf right below us.  We stayed to watch the sun set, then caught a train back to our village for dinner.

After our three days in Cinque Terre, we caught a train south to Livorno.  The city is trying to market itself as "The New Venice".  Indeed, it has canals - drawn here in the last 5 minutes of daylight - but the charm? - not quite there.  Still, we stayed in a funky witch-themed bed-and-breakfast full of modern art and ate at a fun cat-themed restaurant speaking hilariously terrible Italian to the owner who spoke hilariously poor English, so what more could we want in a quick overnight stay before our morning ferry to Corsica?

Cinque Terre I: Vernazza

From Genoa, it was a simple train ride to Cinque Terre - TrenItalia doesn't have a problem with wet leaves, mainly because it is always dry and sunny.  Cinque Terre are a group of 5 old villages spaced along the Ligurian coast.  Because the area is so steep, roads are marginal and there is really no car traffic.  The villages are well served by a rail line - mostly underground in tunnels - but the best way to get between the villages is on the age-old footpaths.  We stayed in Vernazza, a beautiful village steeply arrayed around a perfect little harbour.  The buildings piled on top of each other up the hill offer many places to have a glass of wine and enjoy the view of the other side of town.  The shutters are all green, as specified by the Commissioner of Good Taste*.

The little caruggi (alleyways) here are narrower than in the big city, and much steeper.  Half of them are stairs, often winding around, and sometimes under, people's houses.  It gives that half-indoor / half-outdoor architecture that is so appealing as human habitat - and challenging for urban sketchers!

The church tower is easier to draw, especially when you're sitting on the wharf in the sun with a chocolate croissant.

The area is largely overrun by tourists, but you can time hikes and train trips to avoid most of them, and it is easy to find quiet places off the beaten trails.  Many of the tourists stay in nearby towns, so it is quieter in the piazza in the evening, when more locals come out for soccer games on the beach and discussions in the square.

* Oh yes, there really is a Commissioner of Good Taste.

Genoa

Our best laid plans to get from Cornwall to our flight from Exeter and thence to Italy neglected a simple but little known fact - trains don't work when there are wet leaves on the tracks.  Which happens quite regularly in fall gales in England.  The train arrived late, then we sat on it as it crept along, shuddering every time the engine slipped, while we watched the projected train arrival time get closer and closer to the flight departure time.  Eventually we made the decision to bail out in a small town, still in the pitch dark storm, and managed to roust a local taxi driver for the long drive to the Exeter airport - a bit stressful and fairly expensive, but we made the flight and ended up in Genoa as planned late that afternoon.  And in time for a quick sketch of the central piazza.

Genoa doesn't get much respect among Italy's cities, and a lot of it is a gritty-looking industrial port.  But the large old town is a fabulous mix of grand buildings on big piazze, streets of the elegant palazzi of previous centuries' very rich, and a chaotic warren of narrow caruggi (winding laneways), much of it a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  The caruggi are my thing - from about 1 to 3 meters wide, they are too narrow for any vehicle bigger than a scooter, so they are just full of people going about their business on foot.  Sometimes that business is quite disreputable, especially in the narrowest caruggi, so it was a bit exciting exploring at night, but during the day they cover the range from fashionable businesspeople and stylish luxury shops in the widest parts, families doing groceries at the fish markets and vegetable stands in the mid-width ones, and in the narrowest side branches - well, the prudish might still want to stay out of those.

Like other old European cities, there is detail everywhere.  Which means you can stop at a random location - like, say, a pasticceria serving pastries and cappuccino in a little piazza - and find any number of things to draw.

Cornwall III: St. Michael's Mount, cream tea and Admiral Benbow

On our third day in Cornwall, I took the Great Western Railway to the end of the line in Penzance, then a short bus ride to St. Michael's Mount - a castle on a tall rocky outcrop in the bay.  It's an island at high tide, but at low tide you can walk out along a causeway.  There's a little harbour (so you can get a boat ride back if the tide comes in), a small village and a fantastic castle above the steep forest.  It is still inhabited by the local lord and family, but most of it is open to the public.  It is covered in turrets, ramparts and other castley bits, but the inside is what really impressed me - timber-framed dining hall with stained glass windows, ornate sitting rooms, a cozy library with armchairs around the fire, places to store the blunderbusses, even a chapel.  I think I'll put an offer in if it comes up for sale.

I sat in the sun on an upper deck (or whatever such a thing is called in a castle), against a wall to shelter from the blustery wind, and drew the top parts - chapel, armory, guard tower, all in full crenulation.  Definitely not the sort of thing I get to draw back home.

Keeping an eye on the tide, I stopped in at the island's cafe for a "cream tea" - the traditional way in that part of the world to consume several thousand calories and not have it count as either lunch or dinner.  There were two large creamy buttery scones, a bowl of clotted cream (basically a hybrid of butter and cream), a pot of jam, tea, and, of course, a jug of cream.  It's the thing in Cornwall and neighbouring Devon.  In Cornwall, one puts one's jam on the scone first, then the clotted cream.  In Devon, one does the opposite.  And so inter-regional scorn and contempt ensue.  Being in Cornwall and a culturally-sensitive person, I went jam first.  But I used a little artistic license in the drawing, because it looked better with the red on top.

To metabolize all that fat, I walked in the brisk wind through a nearby nature reserve before catching the double-decker back to Penzance.  I walked around the old town, then, to balance my diet, stopped in at the Admiral Benbow for a pint.  The old pub is where a distant relative set the first chapter of his Treasure Island, and it is full of paraphernalia, nautical and otherwise.  It would drive a detail-oriented sketcher to drink (which is conveniently available).

Cornwall II: Mevagissey

On my second day in Cornwall, I walked from the hotel in St Austell to the port of Mevagissey (pronounced "Mvgsee", apparently).  I learned that British signs report distances in miles, and that miles are a lot longer than kilometers when you are walking.  But the unexpectedly long trail was a classic of laneways, woodlands and English countryside, and came complete with people in Wellies, people in tweed jackets, people on horseback and even a bedraggled shepherd/hermit/Druid(?) who stood behind me mumbling to himself as I drew.

The harbour at Mevagissey is enclosed by two sets of ancient stone wharfs, full of picturesque boats, and backed by the pretty town.  The only thing it lacked, when I got there, was water.  They are serious about their low tides in that part of the world.  But the tide was rising, and in the time it took to eat a Cornish pasty (an acquired taste, which I failed to acquire), the boats were afloat and several were heading out to sea.

If this boat looks like it is sitting partly out of the water, that's because it was - it's keel was still on the bottom as the tide came in.  It has a colour-coordinated post on the non-dock side to keep it from falling over.

Cornwall I: St Ives

We are just back from a carefully-themed trip to "regions that start with the letter 'C' and have old coastal villages and famous walking trails": Cornwall, Cinque Terre Italy, and Corsica.  With a couple larger towns thrown in for good measure.  So lots of sketches to come...

The trip started in Cornwall, where my partner had a work meeting - and so I had free accommodation and lots of time to draw.  The UK has an incredible train system (except when you have a flight to catch in a distant town and a fall storm hits - more later...), which allowed me to explore southwestern England without having to drive on the "wrong" side of the road.  Transfers between trains also give sketching opportunities, starting with a pub in Reading on the way from Gatwick to Cornwall, where I worked on my burgeoning career as an international beer illustrator.

English Heritage kindly provided us with a group of drunken lads on the next leg of the journey - fortunately more amusing than obnoxious - so we were able to enjoy that aspect of British culture.  My first foray the next morning was to St. Ives, a palm-bedecked coastal village near the southwest tip of the country.  It started with a transfer in the little village station of St. Erth, where there was a pleasant tea room and another 30-minute sketching opportunity.

St. Ives is a lovely old fishing town, with traditional narrow winding streets and stone cottages in the old part of town.  Someone was playing a fiddle and singing sea shanties nearby, mothers wheeled prams noisily up the steep cobbled streets, and everyone stopped to say hello and check if my drawing was up to local standards.

St. Ives is also a beach town, probably overrun in the summer, but just pleasantly busy in October.  I arrived in sunshine, but the remnants of an Atlantic hurricane were bearing down for an afternoon arrival.  There were big waves on the town's beaches, and even a few surfers.  I walked out into the heath along the headland on the Southwest trail that starts in the town to watch waves crash against the cliffs.  

Needing to recover from such exertions, and pass a bit of time out of the storm before my return train, I found - surprise - a pub, with a view of the harbour.