The best road cycling routes around Focicchia

Beautiful route. Very quiet, only local traffic. Beautiful views. Fantastic descent after Bustanico with wide asphalt and gentle curves. 10 km of downhill riding at its finest.

Very nice with its panoramic view next to the citadel

The Vecchio rises on the Monte d'Oro and is initially called Agnone. This river is best known for its Cascades des Anglais, which attract hundreds of tourists every day in high season. From the hamlet of Vizzavona onwards, the river is called Vecchio and you only meet very few people. Shortly after entering Canaglia, it joins the Manganello. Here the Vecchio valley becomes very lonely. On the right-hand side, far above the riverbed, the railway line winds its way along the hills, barely visible. You don't notice the busy T20, which lies behind the hills. You only see it when you get off at the Ponte Vecchio. High above us, it crosses the Vecchio valley on the new bridge. Later, the Vecchio flows into the Tavignano, which reaches the sea near Aléria.

On his way to England, Paoli was welcomed and honored throughout Europe as a freedom hero. He met, among others, Joseph II and Goethe, who later described this encounter in Poetry and Truth:[2] Paoli's life was marked by the struggle for the goal of a united Corsican nation. To this end, he entered into varying alliances with France and England and maintained contacts with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Frederick the Great, Catherine II of Russia, the Pope, the young United States of America, the Turkish Sultan, and the Bey of Tunis.

Joseph was born Giuseppe Buonaparte in 1768 to the notary and landowner Carlo Buonaparte and Laetitia Ramolino in Corte, the capital of the Republic of Corsica. The young couple lived there in the house of Laetitia's uncle Arrighi di Casanova. The Republic of Genoa had sold the island to the Kingdom of France in the same year, but an uprising against the French had broken out under the leadership of Pasquale Paoli, in which Carlo Buonaparte took part on diplomatic missions and ultimately as captain of a company of partisans. After the uprising was crushed, however, he was amnestied, his property was returned and in 1771 he was even granted French nobility by Louis XV.

Joseph Bonaparte (7 January 1768 in Corte, Corsica; † 28 July 1844 in Florence), born as Giuseppe Buonaparte, was the eldest brother of Napoleon and was appointed by him first as Joseph I (Italian Giuseppe I) King of Naples (1806–1808) and then also as Joseph I (Spanish José I) King of Spain (1808–1813). After the fall of Napoleon, he called himself Comte de Survilliers.

Pasquale Paoli was born in 1725 in Stretta, in the municipality of Morosaglia, Corsica. His father, General Giacinto Paoli, was a kind of prime minister in the short-lived Kingdom of Corsica under King Theodore I of Corsica and, in 1739, went into exile in Naples with his youngest son, Pasquale. In 1755, Paoli returned to Corsica as a 30-year-old ensign in the King's Corsican Guard and, as commander at the head of the Corsican guerrillas, fought the Genoese. He succeeded in expelling them from the interior and entrenching them in a few port cities. In the same year, Paoli gave Corsica a democratic constitution and temporarily ruled Corsica. He named Corte its capital. Among other things, he was friends with the Buonaparte family, who fought with him against the Corsican enemy Marius Matra. Carlo di Buonaparte, Napoleon's father, collaborated on a Corsican constitution and became Paoli's right-hand man. When the Genoese ceded the island to France on May 15, 1768, pending redemption, Paoli fought the French. In 1768, the French, who had landed with 10,000 men, were forced to withdraw. A year later, however, 22,000 men landed under the command of the Comte de Vaux and defeated the Corsicans in the Battle of Ponte Novu on May 9, 1769. Paoli laid down his arms and chose exile. In 1790, the revolutionary National Assembly voted for the final annexation of Corsica to France.

Very nice route in the forest, in the shade. A little more technical on the ridge with some passages in the rocks and downhill, a little slippery. Beautiful views.