A little bit of Paris outside Ajaccio

[Scruffydog777]

I was studying up on some of the historical places in Paris, to learn more for myself about the city, but also so I don't look like a complete dummy in front of my co-worker who's going with me. After all I've been here four times in the past 3 years.

I was reading about the Tuileries Garden. The Champs_Elysees runs from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde, a large open square famous for among other things, the numerous people who were beheaded there during the reign of terror. Beyond the Place de la Concorde and before the Louvre museum is the Jardin des Tuileries, a large public garden. It used to be the site of a large royal palace (Tuileries Palace) which was built around 1559 by the widow of Henry II ( she didn't build it by herself, I'm sure she had help). It actually joined the Louvre.It got it's name from tile kilns which previously occupied the site. Louis XIV, XV and XVI resided here as well did Napoleon (at different times of course). Louis XVI was guillotened at the near by Place de la Concorde.




It's been attacked a few times, mostly by Parisians, during the French Revolution of course but lastly during the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871. This was a commune that was formed after France's disastorous loss in the Franco Prussian war. Here are a couple of links about it for anyone interested.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuileries_Palace
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune
It was set on fire then and allowed to burn for 48 hours without any attempt to stop it. Luckily most of the Louvre miraculously survived. In 1882, the National assembly voted to have it torn down. Stone and marble from it was used among other things to build a castle in Corsica called near Ajaccio called Chateau de la Punta. It's about 10 kilometers north of Ajaccio, outside a town called Alata.



It's uninhabited now and in a little bit of a state of disrepair, as can be seen on this video on Youtube.
This was just something I stumbled across that I thought someone might be interested in.

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[paintballpdh19]

very interesting

[Deepwaters]

Chateau de la punta -- "punta" may not be a French word. In Italian, la punta means the peak or the tip. This may be a linguistic hybrid, which would be appropriate for Corsica. (Or the word may also have a meaning in Corsu, for all I know.)

[Toc De Mac]

I saw this castle on a TV5 Monde program about Corsica. It is indeed in disrepair...

[FanDeAliFee]

There are other Web items about the <i>Chateau de la Punta</i>, including one <a href="http://www.napoleon.org/en/magazine/itineraries/course/corse_parcoursfour_english.asp?id=448687">here</a>.

Recalling that the <i>ACC</i> music video was shot in a decaying abandoned steel plant, it would seem that if in a subsequent video, Juliette's ghost ever wanted to haunt the chateau at which her "Libertine" party was held, one could do location shooting in Corsica for a song - assuming it was safe!

People curious about architecture in Paris may enjoy looking at Google Earth, which includes three-dimensional scale models of several of its most famous buildings. But better yet are the thousands of buildings which Google Earth displays when you turn on the <i>Ancient Rome 3D</i> layer.

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The misbegotten adventure which constructed <i>Chateau de la Punta</i> has echoes everywhere today, including where I live. The local solons, seeking to "revitalize" our county seat, as if the 21st century will be a replica of the 20th, is undertaking the pointless reconstruction of its downtown - with Other People's Money, of course, including a lot of your federal "stimulus" tax dollars, my fellow Americans. In the process, they managed to unwittingly compromise the root system of the set of magnificent, towering century-old trees which had always crowned the beauty of the municipality. In consequence, all but one has now been removed for fear of the disaster which would be wrought when a combination of wind and drought would one day soon bring one of them down, smashing the downtown to bits.

<i>Chateau de la Punta</i> is not the only great engineering work which is now crumbling in Corsica. The east-coast railroad, taken out by bombing during the Second World War, has never been repaired. As far as I know, Corsica remains the least developed part of France, despite the tourist appeal of its coastline. It would seem that even as nearby NW Med littoral has been massively overdeveloped in the eyes of many locals, Corsica certainly has not been, for whatever reason.