“The train is perfect to take you right into the heart of the island, with little effort,” hiker Gabriella Finelli told me just before she and a friend alighted at the village of Vizzavona and disappeared onto a trail that snaked into the forest. The area forms part of the Regional Natural Park of Corsica, a 350,000-hectare expanse of protected forests, lakes and gorges covering 40% of the island.
Corte remains the place where Corsica’s national identity beats the strongest. There’s a sense of local importance in the air, as this 8,000-person town is home to the island’s main university and its finest museum, the Museu di a Corsica (Museum of Corsica). Housed in a 13th-Century fortress atop a soaring crag, the museum evocatively highlights intriguing aspects of everyday Corsican life, such as displays related to the island’s unique, bittersweet Cap Corse Mattei aperitif (made with cinchona bark, mistelle and other native plants), alongside Corsican crafts and old travel posters for the Trinicellu.
Later that day, I hopped back onto one of the Little Train’s older, wood-panelled carriages that wasn’t updated in the 1970s to continue my journey from Corte to Calvi. The vintage carriage clattered for an hour through the wild Navaccia valley, past boulder-strewn rivers and remote hilltop towns, before hitting the coast by the 18th-Century port-turned-resort of L’Île-Rousse for a final 45-minute run into Calvi. The train trundled along an idyllic stretch of coast known as La Balagne, where the tracks ran so close to the sea that I could have almost scooped sand from the dunes we cut right through.
That evening, I took in a glorious concert of Corsica’s stirring polyphonic singing – revived in recent times as a melodic expression of the island’s soul – at the Jean-Baptiste Cathedral in Calvi’s cobbled old town. Using the town as my base, I took short coastal day trips on the Trinicellu, between Calvi and Ile Rousse, which includes a clutch of tiny stops by request (just tell the conductor where you want to get off), including the fortified seaside resort of Algajola, where I swam in the lee of its 16th-Century Genoese fort. When I was finished, I picked up the train again by sticking out my hand at the station, just like one might hail a taxi.