"Last week there was a tempest," he explained. "It blew everything up ... the phones, the electrics ... we're only just getting back to normal ... yes, we have lots of English here, come for the walking, the quiet ... Denis Healey, he came a happy man, went riding horses in the woods, in shorts. Madame Thatcher came too, sad she seemed no husband, no driver, she came alone and sat at this very table ... planning her destiny, maybe."

At dinner it was cured ham and saucisson, wild boar, cheeses and apple tart and the wine was a Patrimonio. "Did you know we had a King of Corsica once ... King Theodore the First ... that was kept out of our history lessons, and we got clipped round the ear if we talked Corsican, everything in French ... and Pasquale Paoli, the father of the country, what do you know about him? ... He fought against Genoa ... Boswell came here to see him ... he went into exile in England, you know ... died there."

Leaving Quenza was no easy task and it was only after a two-hour lunch with Balesi that I was free to motor on towards Ajaccio. The clouds were still close to the land when I set out and the driving was dangerous and slow, the wheels crunching over fallen chestnuts in their spiky husks; an awful noise, like stepping on snails. But at last I emerged from the mist, the day lightened and I discovered my hitch-hiker sheltering beneath a tree. He made no sign, but I stopped for him anyway.

"That King of Corsica," he said, "was a Westphalian, Baron de Neuhoff, an adventurer. He was crowned in April and ran away in November, same year 1736. He eventually died in the back room of a secondhand clothes shop in Soho ... Ajaccio ... well, there's Napoleon's birthplace ... then the Fesch museum, that was Napoleon's uncle, a cardinal, so the museum's full of religious stuff, a bit stolid, though there is a Botticelli; Virgin and Child and Angel. Lovely colours, dark green; an El Greco kind of faded red and the angel's robe, grey but not grey. One of the curators will follow you around and get you to send him a postcard from abroad, he collects them, he's already got 4,000. You can't miss him, he has big round spectacles and a look of intense dedication verging on madness. Where are you going next?"

"Calvi," I said.

According to my hitch-hiker the west coast of Corsica is the most beautiful part of the Ile de Beaute. A long rocky coast where red mountains hasten like precipices into a royal blue sea, full of promontories and deserted coves, some only approachable from the sea or down rough paths that thread through the maquis. Every bend in the road brings a sight worth hoping for, and once stopped it is difficult to move on. Le farniente all the way, especially at Piana where a stately hotel, Les Roches Rouges, built high on a hillside, echoes with the past and possesses the finest view out of any dining room I have ever seen the wide bay of Porto and the famous calanches: stubby fingers of granite eroded into the strangest shapes and the only place in the world where I have heard customers complain that their room was too large.

And Calvi itself, with legionnaires in white kepis, hand-in-hand with their girls in the alleys and steps that lead down to the restaurants and cafes of the port, where rows of white yachts wait for spring. Outside town the chapel of Notre Dame de Serra, a vantage point that offers one of the most spectacular views in the Mediterranean a vast bay that leads the eye inland towards the mountains, the Citadel on its rock, the old town within the fortifications and, just to one side, a forest of masts.

In Calvi, too, the great mystery has been solved. For 500 years Calvi was a stronghold of the Genoese nation; Columbus came from Genoa, therefore Columbus was born in Calvi; and so, in a tiny street beyond the church, there is a crumbling stone wall and a plaque to prove the supposition. "Dans ce lieu est ne en 1436 Christophe Columb...' Just below the walls of the citadel, to "make assurance double sure'', is a bust of the navigator, looking out over the town; a face that looks like a camp version of Charlton Heston, with his long hair floating free, bronze in the breeze.

It was no easier to leave Calvi than Quenza and I set off wilfully late so that the lights were just coming on in Speloncato when I got there. Speloncato is the smallest of villages and sprawls across a ridge at the head of a wide valley that leads to the sea, a mere 12 miles away. Behind it the mountains. The central square of the village is an odd shape, the houses thrown down with no plan and the streets not streets, but irregular spaces between dwellings. In the dusk, two girls were playing hopscotch, three old men sat by the war memorial and a woman was bending over a potted plant. The fast set were playing cards in the bar.

The Hotel "A Spelunca" was closed, the season over, but Madame Fifi still opened the door when I knocked, her grey hair a halo and her smile bright in the gloom beneath the lintel of the door. "Ah well,'' she said, inviting me in. "I only closed last week."

It was more of a house than a hotel, and grand, too, once the home of a retired cardinal, with a fine stone staircase and a wrought-iron bannister that rose up three or four floors. Not only was I given a bedroom, but a sitting-room as well, spacious and elegant a painting of the cardinal on the wall, good-looking carpets on the floor, a marble fireplace and gilt chandeliers hanging from a moulded ceiling. With my hands behind my back I paced up and down and struck attitudes in the mirror; James Boswell, the Corsican traveller.

Madame Fifi invited me to eat with her that night, in company with her husband and two friends; Italians from Guatemala. At coffee, we were joined by Nuncio Colombani, Madame Fifi's brother, a man who had passed 30 years of his life as an engineer in France, but then at last came home, loving Speloncato with a love that he carried with him during all his exile and brought back to flourish here where he belongs.