Tuesday 28th November 2017
This morning we bought new windscreen wiper blades for our van at the garage just over the road from our parking place in Moriani Plage as our existing ones were falling apart and the forecast is for rain in this area over the next few days! We moved on south down the east coast of Corsica to Aleria. Here is a view of the village centre.
The village is on a hill looking down towards the mountains on one side. On the other side it looks down towards the sea. No wonder the old people chose this as a site to build a city. They started about 2500 years ago.
We visited the Greek/Roman ruins here. The site is very extensive and up till now only a fraction of it has been excavated.
There is an interesting church in the village.
The inside of the church seems quite austere for a southern European catholic church.
What does the painting behind the alter depict? Anne-Marie from Laracor might be able to help?
We visited the museum of artifacts excavated from the site.
There is an amazing range of fantastic artifacts from the site on view here. It is great to see them in a local museum - I imagine if this kind of stuff had been dug up in Britain it would all be in the British Museum in London.
Jupiter.
We moved on a little further down the east coast of Corsica and stopped for the day at Marine de Solaro. We're parked right on the sea front. Here's the view through our windscreen.
This temporarily abandoned beach bar is just next to where we are parked. It's dark now and it has started to rain.
To day we traveled 48 miles (77 kilometres). We are at N41.89135 E9.40102
2 comments:
Hi Roger and Ann,
I am following your trip with great interest. You seemed to have picked a most visually attractive route and I am fascinated by the journey from the cold north to the warm south. Your query re the painting in the Aleria church poses some difficulty. The church itself was an early structure but has recently been repaired and refurbished and had some internal excavation work. The painting which originally hung above the altar was cleaned and restored and now hangs on a side wall and the one which you photographed comes from the big collection of paintings that belonged to Cardinal Fesch. He was an uncle of Napoleon and at one time owned over 16,000 works of art. If you visit to Ajaccio, his Palace is now a museum and would be worth a visit and they could probably tell you the subject matter of the painting as it probably came from their collection.
The paining I would guess is Italian, 16th/17th century and appears to show a bishop/pope attended by two companions amid a scene of devastation - plague, famine??. A louring sky seems to suggest a natural disaster - with a dead, dying and despairing population. I might take a guess that it represents St. Alexander Suli, who is by way of being a patron saint of Corsica but I might be quite wrong. I will continue my researches. Continue to enjoy your great trip. I look forward to your daily accounts and photos.
Love Anne-Marie Laracor
Hi Anne-Marie,
Many thanks for your comment. We will certainly be passing by Ajaccio as our plan now is to go up the west coast of Corsica visiting several important megalithic sites en route. Going into big cities however is a bit problematic in our campervan so we might not make it to Cardinal Fesch's former palace. I'm really impressed by your scholarship!
Finally do you have any thought's about the comparative lack of bling in churches round here? Over the water in Italy or Spain there would be masses of gold plated effigies of Mary + Child etc etc.
With love, Roger.
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