Dancing for Dionysus

I've been thinking just now about the pottery we saw yesterday at the museum at ancient Aleria. The fact that the artefacts were drawn from across the central Mediterranean reveals how critical the place was as a trading hub. A map in the museum shows the way it was linked to other places in the early classical era.

However, it's not the collection's historical significance that I have been mulling over, but the pieces themselves, particularly the Attic Red Figure vases. They are the most beautiful and thought provoking things I have seen in a while, perhaps since visiting the small museum at Mycenae a couple of years ago.

It seems the knack of being able to capture the essence of something simply by outlining it is an innate human characteristic. Picture-space based on mathematical perspective may be a product of European culture, but humans have been skilled at line drawing for tens of thousands of years, as the cave art at Lascaux and Altamira testifies. Japanese woodcuts, the calligraphic landscape artists of China, as well as Western masters like Botticelli, Durer, Ingres, Matisse and Picasso, all were magicians at 'taking a line for a walk'. The anonymous Black and Red Figure vase painters' work in Aleria museum can stand comparison with anyone. They did not take their line for a walk, they made it dance.

A few years ago I read 'Camera Lucida', Roland Barthes' reflections on the nature of the photographic image. He distinguishes between two modes of looking. One, called the studium, places images within the context of similar works and attempts to understand their cultural value. The second, Barthes calls 'the punctum' - those images which 'exist only for us' - that have an individual significance, a psychological power that pricks the viewer. These are not so much 'arresting images' but ones that 'arrest' the viewer. It seems the red figure  'collared' me good and proper.

For all the apparent simplicity of their line, they seem ambiguous, contradictory even. 

Exultant, yet restrained.

The way the couple's feet make a 'X'' shape as they turn to glance at each other - so beautiful.

Startlingly candid, yet oddly coy.

A strange dichotomy between the erect phallus and the spindly, almost feminine arms - slightly androgynous, disturbing..

Wild, yet farcical.

These two  seem to be having a chat amid the Dionysian revelry, "How's the missus, then" 

The historian Bettany Hughes recently presented a TV programme about the cult of Dionysus. It made an interesting point - that the cult was popular not because Athenian society was permissive and unconstrained, but precisely the opposite. Citizens were expected to be committed to their civic and religious duties, emphasis on physical prowess and beauty smacked of what we now might see as 'body fascism', the role of women citizens was restricted to household matters mainly, only female slaves and prostitutes could wander the streets. - Dionysian festivals, and the imagery associated with them, constituted a rare opportunity to cast aside these constraints. Perhaps the contradictory aspects of the figures reflect the tensions between the social conventions and spirited the individualism of Athen's fifth century democratic experiment. . 

For some reason a snippet of a Joni Mitchell song occurred to me as I was thinking about the red figures of Aleria.

"I met a friend of spirit 

He drank and womanized 

And I sat before his sanity

I was holding back from crying

He saw my complications

And he mirrored me back simplified

And we laughed how our perfection

Would always be denied."

It seemed strange. The opening lines of 'Refuge of the Roads are not overtly Dionysian. It is a song about wanderlust, so I struggled to see the connection. Maybe it's the bit about seeing complications mirrored back simplified - that's what I think these images do, what all great linear draughtsmen can do, but these figures address questions of our wild animal nature, our passionate exultant selves, yet they are grounded in the commonplace - perfection denied; therein lies their power and undying fascination.

Evening becomes twilight. Tonight is our last in Aleria, we've been here five days, that's a semi-permanent residency by our standards. It has been a great day. This morning we headed back to the Etang de Diane, this time I took my swimming stuff and snorkel and had a good time being a fish.

The small splosh to the right of the waves breaking on the reef is Pete...

Where the afternoon went I have no idea, it simply slipped by. It is our goodbye Aleria moment a stunningly sunny and blue one. We declared it the correct moment to open the posh bottle of Rosé we bought in Moutere Valley in New Zealand. Delicious!

Before dark we took a last stroll along the beach towards the river mouth. The Tavignano is one of Corsica's larger rivers tumbling down through deep wooded gorges from the mountainous interior. The beach is covered in driftwood, not the odd bough, but whole trunks white as dinosaur bones, gnarled roots wind sculpted into strange Dali-esque forms.

In Spain people have taken to piling stones on beaches making personal 'cairns' to mark their visit. Here is strictly shingle, so driftwood is the preferred medium. Big boughs and slender eucalyptus branches woven into temporary shelters, some constructed on top of sand 'mottes' or protected by ditches. 

A long salt-whitened tree trunk beached by the water's edge got me thinking about Corsica's first inhabitants. They island hopped here from Tuscany via Elba and Capraia. Their dugout canoes could not have been much bigger than this fallen tree. Maybe 9000 years ago groups of them paddled up this river, built temporary shelters out of what was to hand. It must have been a hunter gatherers Eden, the island had been cut off for a million years. Strange animals roamed its forests, such as pygmy hippos. The first Corsicans feasted them to extinction. 

What struck me, among the latter-day shelters, the outline of ancient Aleria silhouetted on its bluff above the river, the lights of camping bungalows among the trees, was how much we had in common - the people now with the people then.

The point was reinforced by two kids on the beach. They had found a couple of empty 5l plastic water carriers, They beat out a jaunty rhythm with sticks on their make-do drum kit. Their older sister jigged a bit, dancing for Dionysus, then wandered off and stared at the sea.

Another zero day when time plays tricks on us, right there, right now - simultaneously here now and back then, mere shadows on a beach at twilight who share a rare moment then fade away.

Mooching towards a perfect day

The rocky road from Rondinara

Once we decided to leave Rondinara, the inevitable question - where next? Northwards towards Bastia Gill found six sites listed in Acsi, two were naturist - err... no - which left the remaining four. The first, 'Camping Eucalyptus' at Solana was by the main road in a patch of woodland by a god forsaken looking beach. We drove in, wandered about, it was somewhat ramshackle, so we drove back out. 

There were two more sites 20kms further on at Ghisonaccia. The village is the nearest you get in Corsica to the large sprawling 1960s French tourist developments like Marseillan Plage on the Languedoc coast. The place itself is bland and soulless; still, we followed the camping signs down towards the sea. As we approached the turn-off for the first site, suddenly we were surrounded by a large flock of scrawny sheep. They were making their way towards a fromagerie; ewes milk cheese is a Corsican speciality. As the sheep were blocking the road to the first site we carried on to the second. It was big, commercial looking and somewhat regimented. No, not our style - we motored on towards Aleria. If the place is terrible, we agreed, we could always return here.

No ewe turn

Luckily, the Marina de Aleria site seemed Ok, a typical seaside site in pine trees next to be beach, reminiscent of the places on the Atlantic coast in Les Landes we used when the children were small. We pitched un-enthusiastically, with a 'it will do I suppose' attitude. Our spirits were depressed further when, as darkness fell, it began to rain steadily. 

There was a knock on our door. The Dutchman next door had spotted our awning was drooping in the middle, I had pitched it at too shallow an angle, it was slowly filling with rain. No problem, thanking him profusely, I hopped out of the van, lowered the front awning leg, this released the trapped rainwater. With comic timing worthy of Mr. Bean 20 litres of cold water fell on my head. My neighbour roared with laughter, "You've made my day!" He kept repeating. I managed a wan smile and swiftly retreated indoors to wring out my tee shirt and shorts in the shower.

Next day the weather improved. We had a practical morning cleaning the van and doing our laundry. A cycle track runs from the beach side site to the small village of Aleria. It's a modern development in the main, but not unpleasant and has a small, but well stocked E Leclerc supermarket and a bank - all useful. The site's facilities are hardly luxurious, but serviceable with plenty of hot water in the showers and washing-up sinks.

Though the site was almost full - again mainly families with small children - because the pool, sports field and tennis courts are some distance from the pitches there was none of the problems we experienced at Rondinara with feral tweenies. Indeed, the problem now was not unsupervised kids but overbearing parents. The French Swiss family next to us in a minuscule VW Camper had two kids, one a boy about five, and his younger sister - almost two, at a guess. Dad seemed to spend the whole time lecturing them, he went on and on in a measured, but admonishing tone. This made the kids miserable. They cried half the day. I dubbed them - Prince and Princess of Wails.

The estuary of the Tavignano

Aleria is situated at the mouth of one of Corsica's larger rivers, the Tavignano. The landscape here is gentle by Corsican standards, the mountains some miles inland beyond a broad fertile plain growing vines and fruit. As well as the river mouth, there is a large tidal inlet nearby. It's name, L'etang de Diana, reveals the area's classical heritage. The Greeks established a colony here in 578BC and afterwards the settlement was in turn controlled by the Carthaginians, and Romans, continuing to be the major town on the east coast until the Genovese developed Bastia in the sixteenth century. 

The area began to grow on us, 'it's ok here' becoming 'its really nice'. There is nothing spectacular about it, but wandering down the beach at twilight among driftwood sculpted by the wind and waves, or pedalling around the coastal tracks through dunes awash with flowers, the charm of the place is irresistible. Yesterday was lovely, today one of those perfect Mediterranean days, the ones that call you back south when really you had been determined to explore Scandinavia.

Driftwood = Travis earworm

So, what is a perfect day? It started well with temperatures first thing hovering in the low twenties with a gentle cool breeze blowing in off the sea. We had breakfast, bought some bread for lunch from the site shop then pedalled north past Aleria's 'Réserve du président' Cave Cooperative, it's vineyards covering the old dunes. Soon the tarmac ends and you are on a network sandy tracks. Apart from a ramshackle beach bar  'La paill'hot' the area is completely undeveloped, acres of scrubby dunes covered in spectacular wild flowers. 

Quiet tracks by the sea - Ebike perfection

Carpeted with wild flowers is not a cliche hereabouts

After a few kilometres you reach the entrance to the L'etang de Diane. It is guarded by a ruined Mortello tower and an old breakwater protects the inlet itself. The oysters and mussels produced here are famous - Napoleon Bonaparte's favourites allegedly. The Etang is off limits to the public but the empty, peaceful beaches are reason enough to make the trip. I reminded myself to pack my swimming trunks and snorkel if we returned another day.

Etang de Diane

home to Napoleon's favourite oysters

The towers are there to protect the populace from Saracen pirate raids - not keep the oysters safe.

The concrete breakwater probably protects the oyster beds.

We returned to the campsite for lunch. By now the clouds on the distant mountains had dissolved, blue skies prevailed. Gill cooked up a courgette and mint frittata, the thermometer notched up towards the 30s. We relaxed for a bit. However, we did have afternoon plans. 

Yay! outside kitchen moment...

The site of ancient Aleria is situated on a rocky outcrop above the river, about two kilometres south of the modern town. We are still using the guidebook we bought for our first trip, though it is almost a quarter of a century out of date, it still seems accurate enough. At least so I hoped, because it mentioned that the Genovese fortress at the old town had an interesting small museum containing pottery excavated from the archaeological site. 

Ancient Aleria's old citadel occupies an outcrop about two kilometres south of the modern village.

First we had to find it. Though the turn-off was only a kilometre up the main road it was not a comfortable ride. The traffic on the T10 is fast and unforgiving towards cyclists. So keen were we to get off the main road that we headed off at the junction prior the archaeological site. This only became apparent after a few kilometres when the 'nearby' ruins were nowhere to be seen. The valley of the Tavignano was beautiful on this gloriously sunny late May afternoon, so we were not too put out about our accidental detour. We just turned around and read the sign properly.

unusually pastoral for Corsica - but lovely nonetheless

What was once a substantial settlement of 30,000 people is now reduced to a tiny village on top of a crag overlooking the coastal plain, the original acropolis I suppose. The current buildings are from the medieval period. The museum is housed in the Genovese fortress. 

All that remains of the old city is a hamlet of a few houses gathered arounf an ancient church and Genovese fort

The excellent archaeological museum is housed in the old fortress.

Our antique Rough Guide did not lie, even better, the entrance fee no longer apples - it was free. The collection of ceramics reflect ancient Aleria's strategic position at the intersection of Greek, Carthaginian, Etruscan and Roman sphere's of influence. There are superb examples of pottery from all these cultures, from the 5th to the 2nd centuries BC. In particular the collection of 4th century Attic red figure ware is stunning. We spent over an hour being wowed. We did not expect work of such quality to be on show.

Vernacular ware from the  6th century BC - possibly S. Italy

Ancient Etruscan ware

Attic Black Vase - late 5th century?

Attic Red figure Krater - early 4th century BC perhaps?

Back to earth with a bump - a short, but scary ride downhill to modern Aleria, a quick visit to E Leclerc, - we had plans. Up until the last few days the weather had been too unreliable to unpack the outside kitchen. In celebration of outside kitchen moment - tonight's menu - hake cooked en papillote  on a bed of Puy lentils, grilled peppers, sauteed spuds. What we needed was a bottle of local white produced from a grape variety unique to Corsica grown less than half a kilometre from our pitch.  E Leclerc duly supplied..

Our en papillote  culinary triumph!

The meal was delicious, the sun-set, the stars popped out into a velvety sky, the night was warm, eventually, next door, the Prince and Princess of Wails dropped-off, Scops owls bleeped among the pines trees - a perfect day. Very few days are perfect. Today happened to be one of them...

Zero days

If you travel for weeks on end there comes a point when departure seems like a distant memory and homecoming some vague conjecture. The date, day, even the month becomes a little hazy, and you live in the moment. We seem to have reached this point early, as we have been on the road for less than a month, but it seems like forever.

We moved from Rondinara today. Maybe our initial instinct to visit new places was right. Having just spent three nights in this fondly remembered haunt, though it was not unpleasant, in the end it proved disappointing. I suppose people return to places as a kind of touchstone, seeking reassurance  against wholesale change and 'future shock'. The risk if  your favourite spot looks utterly different,is that you feel cheated, as if short-changed.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, in the case of Rondinara the opposite was true, it had hardly changed at all since the last visit here two decades ago. This was not reassuring either, though the place seemed much the same, I had changed - suddenly I felt confronted by a different me.. This was not merely a question of ageing, - that back then I had fair hair, but now grey and receding - but more the nagging sense that the person I have become is very different to who I once was. Being true to yourself may be regarded as laudable, but in reality the self changes.

It's all the same! - the lovely path to the beach.

the warm, crystal clear sea

the infinity pool,

The outcrop, - in 1998 it was crowded with Italian attempting to find a mobile phone signai...a rare thing back then.

and us - not the same, where did two decades go?

A few months ago I read of a longitudinal study which performed personality tests on the same individuals from the early 1970s to the present day. It found that people aged forty displayed similar personality and character traits to those observed in late adolescence. However, twenty years on the differences were marked. The sixty year olds were significantly dissimilar to their younger selves. I suppose this is not surprising,- if you have had children and have seen them grow up, watched parents grow old and pass away, at work maybe assumed ever greater responsibility and felt the weight of looking after others' livelihoods as well as your own - these are not insignificant matters, it would be strange to remain unaffected and unchanged. 

This is the sensible, considered view, but not how I reacted initially returning to Rondinara; it felt as if I had bumped into an old friend - I was simply delighted, asserting, in the words of Paul Simon's song "after changes upon changes we are more or less the same". It was in that frame of mind that I uploaded the previous post, celebrating how wonderful it was to return, but such heady romanticism proved to be short lived.

This was partly due to bad luck, or perhaps a hasty judgement. The pitches at Rondinara are somewhat random, they are numbered, but where one ends and another begins is unclear. It's a question of staking your claim. After wandering about for a while we chose one which was flat, easy to manoeuvre into, handy for the sanitary block - it seemed ideal. We did not give the nearby rusty pole with the basketball ring a second glance.

Nice level pitch.

How did we fail to spot the basketball ring?

Insignificant to adults but a magnet for children, the pole had a kind of totemic attraction for small humans. At first it was interesting watching them play. Particularly intriguing were a group of four girls, perhaps aged between nine and thirteen. It appeared a larger version of toddler reins had been purloined as a toy by these tweeny girls to act out equine fantasies. One participant wore the harness, the other took the reins and then the pair clip-clopped about the place in a variety of Dobbin related games. Every so often the girls would swap roles. The older girls seemed too big to be quite so immersed in pretend play, but they seemed most 'in role'. A variety of horse characters emerged, sad lame, skittish and gallopy and dangerously snappish. The latter role was played out with such gusto by the oldest, with much mane shaking and attempted biting that her smaller rider eventually tired of the aggression and delivered a mighty thwack across her naughty mounts' haunches with the loose end of the leather reins. This seemed to work at treat. Dobbin settled down after that.

At what point, we wondered, do the young lose this spontaneous capacity for pretend play, and why? At the moment I am reading Dorothy Carrington's 'The Dream Hunters of Corsica. Published in the mid 1990s, it is a unique ethnographic account of her research over the preceding three decades into occult belief and practise in Corsica's remote mountainous interior. What she found was a shared belief in a parallel dream-world. The book concentrates on the activities of Mazzeri 'dream hunters', gifted individuals commonly found in Corsican villages up until the middle of the twentieth century. They were able to predict death by entering a trance-like dream in which they hunted and killed animal spirits, some recognisable as people in the local community. The individuals in question, their spirits having been killed, were doomed to die in the real world in the near future. The existence of this parallel world was generally accepted, on certain days of the year villagers would see processions of the dead, and take elaborate precautions to protect themselves. Dorothy Carrington argues these practises reach back to the belief system of Corsica's earliest inhabitants, hunter gatherers and herders who migrated to the island around 7000BC. The survival of such occult practises until a generation ago is remarkable, but entirely normal.

Watching the children's game, where in an act of shared imagining they became horses is not considered magical, simply because we categorise it as childish. If grown-ups did this we would dismiss it as insane. However, even today sensible adults are allowed to 'suspend' their disbelief - in the theatre, watching TV or reading a story, we allow ourselves to enter imaginary worlds. Other cultures, particularly people living in more subsistence based societies, do not make the same distinctions between the actual and the imagined, or when they do they give the experiences equal credence. These zero days, when time passes unnoticed, then perhaps it is easier to countenance the world of the dream hunters, that the distinctions we make are more culturally conditioned than we like to think.

The horse-girls were not the only children playing by the magic basketball pole. There were four or five kids kicking a ball about. With the Champion's League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid scheduled as tonight's entertainment in the bar then I suppose soccer related play was popular. We duly went along to watch Liverpool lose due to two comedy errors on the part of the their goal-keeper and a some football magic from Gareth Bale. We were the only Brits in the bar, every one else was German, cheering along Herr Klopp. Given the goalie was German too, it must have been a disappointing evening.

Liverpool 1, Real Madrid 3

The football game next to our pitch would not have been a problem had the people next door not decided to keep their son entertained by bringing along two collapsible mini goals. Once these were erected next to us the popularity of football soared, soon there were more than a dozen players aged from five to fifteen having a kick about less than 5m from the van.

At first - a couple of little kids kicking a footbasll - ah bless...

then there were ever more and bigger players 

They played until nightfall only to reappear next morning as we having breakfast. We felt besieged. Inevitably the ball bounced off the side of the van leaving an almost imperceptible perfectly round dent on the rear garage door. Time to move on we decided. Out came the Acsi book and we began counting down the days to the ferry - goodbye zero days! Goodbye too Rondinara, I don't think we regret returning, nevertheless perhaps our initial instinct too seek out new places was correct. Places are never the same when you return for sentimental reasons, essentially because you are not the same either. Maybe checking out the dates of school holidays in Europe might be a good move too.

The site was full of German's with small kids in tow - they have a two week half term break in May.

The 'natural' ambiance of Rondinara attracts slightly left field types - much wafting pantaloons on Earth-mothers, partners with prophetic beards,  khaki voluminous cargo shorts and Maori inspired tattoos...