The Town
Place Porta - its official name, place de la Liberation, has never caught on - forms Sartene's nucleus. Once the arena for bloody vendettas, it's now a well-kept square opening onto a wide terrace that overlooks the rippling green valley of the Rizzanese. Flanking the south side of place Porta is the church of Ste-Marie , built in the 1760s but completely restored to a smooth granitic appearance. Inside the church, the most notable feature is the weighty wooden cross and chair carried through the town by hooded penitents during the Catenacciu procession. A flight of steps to the left of the Hotel de Ville , formerly the governor's palace, leads past the post office to a ruined lookout tower , which is all that remains of the town's twelfth-century ramparts. This apart, the best of the old town is to be found behind the Hotel de Ville in the Santa Anna district , a labyrinth of constricted passageways and ancient fortress-like houses that rarely give any signs of life. Featuring few windows and often linked to their neighbours by balconies, these houses are entered by first-floor doors which would have been approached by ladders - dilapidated staircases have replaced these necessary measures against unwelcome intruders. To the left of rue des Freres-Bartoli are the strangest of all the vaulted passageways, where outcrops of rock block the paths between the ancient buildings. Just to the west of the Hotel de Ville, signposted off the tiny place Maggiore, you'll find the impasse Carababa , a remarkable architectural puzzle of a passageway cut through the awkwardly stacked houses. A few steps away, at the western edge of the town, place Angelo-Maria-Chiappe offers a magnificent view of the Golfe du Valinco. Sartene's only other cultural attraction is Musee de la Prehistoire Corse (closed at time of writing, pending a move to new premises across town; check with tourist office), Corsica's centre for archeological research. The museum contains a rather dry collection of mostly Neolithic and Torreen pottery fragments, with some bracelets from the Iron Age and painted ceramics from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries.
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