I picked him up on the Bonifacio road about five minutes after picking up the car: a young hitch-hiker, slopping over with confidence. He knew all there was to know about Corsica, life and the universe.

"I come over every year," he said, "out of season. It's like Provence was 40 years ago. The air is still scented here, like in Giono or Pagnon ... smells like honey ... a good lazy place, too ... They say the Barbary pirates only took Corsican slaves if they were really desperate. It's le farniente, which translated means a douce et voluptueuse indolence, and is catching. I used to be a tour guide here, but gave it up. Work is bad for the soul.'' He smiled, pleased with himself. "There's Bonifacio," he said, "the other Gibraltar."

The comparison does not do Bonifacio justice. More attractive than Gibraltar, it stands on a huge spur of rock with the sea on one side and the long narrows of the harbour on the other. High on that rock, the old town hides behind huge bastions and battlements and, to the south, hangs carelessly above the Mediterranean, which here seems as dark as a sailor's uniform and contrasts beautifully with the gold of the limestone cliffs, all streaked and sea-battered.

In the old town, through the Genoa Gate, the roads are narrow enough to be called alleys and the houses are high, with wooden steps, almost vertical, leading into shady interiors. Across a number of the alleys fly buttresses, the ``arcades'' that were once used to collect rainwater from the roofs and carry it into cisterns; reserves that were indispensable in times of siege. In one street, La rue des deux empereurs, there was a plaque on the wall which announced that Napoleon had stayed at No7 for five weeks in 1793. As I gawped, Mr Stefani opened the door and appeared on the step.

"What's it like," I asked, "living with Napoleon?"

Mr Stefani laughed. "Napoleon's a nuisance," he said. "I can never get to sleep ... busloads of people coming up here, in season and out, talking, shouting, especially after dinner ... and the guides, you know what their voices are like ... hacksaws ... I know all about Napoleon ... I lie in bed and listen to his life-story every night."

As we talked three women, faces stiff with make-up, jewellery clanking, stopped to listen. Stefani spoke to them in Corsican and they understood in Italian.

"Aie," they said, forming up like a tragic chorus. "Do not complain ... we live in Mussolini's village and our trouble is worse. We have the fascisti who come to worship him; they put notices on our doors ... Bravo II Duce! ... and then there are those who come to hate him and pee on the wall. We, too, pay taxes and cannot get to sleep. We tell you, you know nothing!"

The next day I won a victory over Corsica's contagious indolence and was ready to leave by the crack of lunchtime. I put a picnic together and followed the road until it petered out on the shores of the Gulf of Santa-Manza. I was in a long empty bay with a view to the sea. There were two or three dinghies moored, some bits of bleached tree-trunk from the Tate Gallery, two men sitting idly on the sand, listening to the water lap, and a girl with sunburnt hair reading a book. On the other side of the bay a white yacht, serene and unmoving, was anchored to another empty shore and behind it the hills rose to become the jagged dark teeth of the central mountains.

But two's company and three's a crowd I drove a little further and found a mile or two of rock and sand for myself, unwrapped my food and uncorked the wine. As I did so, a solitary pig, young and slim and sporty, came loping out of the maquis, obviously determined to spend the afternoon on the beach, scavenging, and grunting like me with a fathomless pleasure.

That afternoon I drove up into the mountains, having lingered so long by the sea that I was still travelling when night fell. As the road climbed I went deeper into a drifting cloud that was pierced only by great slabs of rock, and everywhere the pines lowered at me, threatening regiments of them. In the tiny town of Zonza the cloud lay dead and cold in the streets. All I saw all I could see was two men outside a cafe talking, standing like gloomy sentinels in the mist, their cigarettes glowing red in the dark.

At Quenza, inside the Sole e Monti Hotel, Felicien Balesi was waiting, a huge log fire burning in the grate behind him. Balesi was a short, black-haired man with a beaming and intelligent face, his body bubbling with energy. His eyes shone; his moustache had a life of its own and his trousers were rolled at the bottom. He switched from Corsican to French and back again like a man changing gears on a motorbike and spun through his hotel with the elan of an opera star on roller-skates.