Around place de Gaulle
France > Corsica > Ajaccio > Place de Gaulle
Place de Gaulle (otherwise known as place du Diamant, after the Diamanti family who once owned much of the property in Ajaccio) is the most useful point of orientation, even if it's not much to look at – just a windy concrete platform surrounded by a shopping complex. The only noteworthy thing on the square is the huge, bronze equestrian statue, a pompous lump commissioned by Napoléon III in 1865 showing the first Napoléon in Roman attire, surrounded by his four brothers.Devotees of Napoléon should take a stroll 1km up cours Grandval, the wide street rising west of place de Gaulle and ending in a square, the Jardins du Casone, where gaudily spectacular son et lumière shows take place in summer. An impressive monument to Napoléon dominates the square, standing atop an appropriately huge, proto-Fascist pedestal inscribed with the names of his battles. Behind the monument lies a graffiti-bedaubed cave where Napoléon is supposed to have frolicked as a child.
Pages in section ‘Place de Gaulle’: Napoléon and Corsica.
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