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For a small island, Corsica packs a hefty punch. Don't be fooled by the statistics: this mountainous, maquis-covered, cliff-hanging island may be little more than 3000 square miles, but it has more variety and vitality, more soul and splendour squeezed into its craggy frame than an island twice its size.

Strategically placed at the trading heart of the western Mediterranean, Corsica has been around a long time. Ancient burial mounds and mysterious stone monoliths date the first Corsicans as far back as six to seven thousand years BC, though it took the Greeks and Romans to establish the island's commercial reputation. Invaded by Goths, Vandals and Saracens, squabbled over by the maritime powers of Pisa and Genoa, coveted by the Spanish, allied to the English, ruled over by Italy for 500 years and by France for the 200, Corsica has always remained doggedly independent with its own language, its own customs and its own incomparable landscape.

In Corsica it's difficult to decide whether it's the coastline or the interior which casts the strongest spell. With more than six hundred miles of shoreline there's no shortage of fine sandy beaches, isolated coves and grand sweeping bays to choose from, though some of them, cut off by plunging cliffs and rocky headlands, can only be reached by boat or the kind of paths that only goats would be happy using.

Inland, apart from a narrow strip of coastal plain in the east where the Greeks and Romans first settled, the island's interior is a breathtaking landscape of snow-dusted mountain peaks, thick dark forests, glittering glacial lakes and steep-sided gorges through which white water rivers like the Golo, Gravona and Tavignano tumble down from the heights. Here, too, are ancient mountain villages huddled on impossibly narrow ridges or perched on easily-defended hilltops, Romanesque churches, medieval battlements and dizzying, twisting roads that spool down from rugged highlands into sun-drenched valleys ribbed with vineyards, shaded by olive groves and thickly swaddled in chestnut forests.

At any season Corsica captivates. In autumn and winter the air is filled with the chill scent of wet granite, woodsmoke and dripping pine, and in spring and summer the sweet aromas of maquis herbs drift over a sun-baked landscape, mixing with the dusty fragrance of country paths and the salty tang of the shoreline. Little wonder that Napoleon Bonaparte, Corsica's favourite son, boasted he could recognise the island blindfold, by its scent alone.

In Corsica, it is hard to avoid the Emperor. Triumphant in roman toga or plain and corporal-like in long coat and bicorne hat, there are statues of the great Corsican everywhere, streets and squares named after him, prints and portraits of him in every bar and cafe. The memories are strongest in Ajaccio, capital of Corsica: the house on rue Saint-Charles where he was born in 1769, the Cathedrale Notre Dame de la Miséricorde where he was baptised in 1771 and the Jardins du Casone where he played as a boy. His birthplace, the Maison Bonaparte, is now a museum, its procession of open-shuttered salons packed with Napoleonic memorabilia. Of all the fine exhibits on show - family portraits, marble busts, period furnishings, letters, maps and family mementoes by the score - none is as powerful as the sedan chair just inside the front door. It was in this very chair, so it is said, on her way back from Sunday mass, that Napoleon's mother felt the first imperial contractions.

There is more Napoleana to be found in the basement of Ajaccio's Musee Fesch: miniatures, medals, a unique chess set matching an ivory Bonaparte against the French monarchy and, most memorable perhaps, a mannequin dressed in that immediately recognisable tail-coated uniform jacket that Napoleon wore as Colonel of the Horse Guards. But no-one comes to the Musee Fesch for Napoleon Bonaparte. The real treasures here are on the floors above. In arched halls and grand salons overlooking the city's busy port and the distant mountains of Porticcio you will find one of the most formidable collections of Italian art outside the Louvre. Assembled by Napoleon's step-uncle, the acquisitive Cardinal Fesch, and bequeathed to Ajaccio on his death, there are real masterpieces here: Sandro Botticelli's La Vierge a l'Enfant, closely run by Giovanni Bellini's version of the same subject, Titian's Portrait de l'Homme au Gant and Veronese's Leda et Le Cygne, along with equally important works by Spanish, Flemish, French, German and Dutch masters.

Criss-crossing the tumbling course of the Gravona river and the narrow-gauge tracks of the delightful Trinighellu island railway (which burrows its way through 43 tunnels and across numerous viaducts on its 70-mile journey between Ajaccio and Bastia), a leisurely two-hour drive from the capital will bring you to the university town of Corte. Ever since freedom fighter and patriot Pasquale Paoli made the town his centre of government in the eighteenth century, Corte has been Corsica's "secret capital" and the home of Corsican nationalism.

Occupying the slopes of a rocky spur at the junction of the Tavignano and Restonica valleys, the town is dominated by a grand and intimidating fifteenth-century Citadel which served as a base for the French Foreign Legion until 1984. In the old Legion barracks you'll find the Musée Régional d'Anthropologie de la Corse. Designed by award-winning Italian architect Andrea Bruno, it provides a comprehensive anthropological record of traditional island life from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the bulk of its collection assembled over forty years by local priest and professor of Human Sciences, Pere Louis Doazan.

If Ajaccio is the capital of Corsica and Corte its spiritual home, then Bastia, a prosperous freight and passenger port at the base of the finger-like Cap Corse, is the island's commercial heart. The most Italian of Corsica's towns, its lofty harbour-side tenements strung with lines of washing and laced with stepped passageways or ruelles, Bastia, like Corte and Ajaccio, is dominated by its ancient Citadel.

Here, in the vaulted cellars of the newly-refurbished Governor's Palace, for four centuries an enduring symbol of Genoese domination, you will find the Musée Ethnographique de Bastia. Founded in 1952 and filled with an extraordinary range of exhibits (from a finely-worked roman sarcophagus to a submarine conning tower), this intriguing museum reaches into the very heart of Corsica. It does so, most compellingly, through its displays of the age-old customs, traditions and way of life of the people who have made this remarkable island their home.

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