Saint Julia and the Fountains of the Breasts

Nonza owes its name to Castrum Nuntiae, the herald : an old Roman post set on this belvedere to signal to the colony of Mariana, on the other coast of the island, any incursion towards the Agriate. The site was inhabited from prehistory, and in a cave rock paintings from the second millennium before our era have been found. In the Middle Ages the village drew tight around the castle of the Avogari lords, and later the De Gentile, masters of the central third of the Cap ; Genoa destroyed the fortress in 1489 and, in 1625, put an end to the last seigneuries.

On the summit of the Monte, where the old castle stood, Pascal Paoli had a square watchtower of grey-green schist built in 1760 to watch over the gulf of Saint-Florent. It is called the Paoline tower, and it has been a listed monument since 1926. In 1768, during the French conquest, Nonza was shelled from the sea, and tradition keeps the memory of the soldier Jacques Casella who, wounded and left alone in the tower, feigned a whole garrison by shouting orders and firing several weapons at once.

Below, the long beach of black pebbles is nothing natural : it was born of the spoil of the old asbestos quarry of Canari, closed in 1965, which silted up the old landing before the sea, little by little, took back its rights. In the centre of the village the church of Santa Ghjulia, an old pieve church rebuilt in the sixteenth century over a far older sanctuary, keeps a painting in which the saint appears crucified.

The story of Julia comes down to us in two versions that the hagiographers never reconciled. The first, accepted by the diocese of Ajaccio, has her born into a noble family of Carthage : after the taking of the city by the Vandals she was sold as a slave to a Syrian merchant, Eusebius, whom she served with zeal. On the way to Gaul the ship put in near Nonza, on a day when a bull was being sacrificed to the gods. Julia, a Christian, refused to appear at the pagan feast. The governor Felix Saxo made her master drunk, had the girl carried off and ordered her to sacrifice ; for her refusal she was struck, dragged by the hair, scourged, and at last crucified.

The second version, the one Nonza prefers, calls her a daughter of the village, at the very beginning of the fourth century, under Diocletian. Because she refused to sacrifice to the gods, the Romans tortured her, and the legend has kept above all this torment : her executioners cut off her breasts and threw them against the rocks below the village. In that same instant two fountains sprang from the rock. The miracle doubled their fury ; they bound her to a fig tree and left her to die. In both versions a dove escaped from her mouth at the moment of her death.

And this is where honesty belongs. The two accounts contradict each other on almost everything, the time, the birthplace, the torment, and local tradition ended by mingling them, to the point of painting the saint both crucified and with her breasts cut off, as on the old canvas in the church. Historians hold the Corsican version to be unlikely, and some have even wished to confuse Julia with Saint Devota. What is certain is not the biography, but the cult.

A first sanctuary was raised below the village and then destroyed by the Barbary corsairs in 734. The spring, however, has never run dry. It is called the fountain of the breasts, or the fountain of Saint Julia : it wells up beneath the road at the northern entrance of Nonza, and one goes down to it by a stair of fifty-four steps to the little chapel that shelters it. Its waters were held to be miraculous. People came from all Corsica, sometimes barefoot, to be healed and above all to protect mothers against the drying up of their milk.

A plaque on the rock recalls the martyrdom, and since the Great War passers-by throw a coin into the basin and make a wish. Each twenty-second of May the patronal feast still gathers the village and the pilgrims around Saint Julia, proclaimed patron of Corsica together with Saint Devota, and venerated too at Livorno, on the far shore of the sea.

Whoever climbs today to the Paoline tower takes in at a glance all that carries the story : to the north, the villages of the Cap in a row ; to the south, the Agriate and, in clear weather, the high peaks of the island ; to the east, the dark houses pressed around the church ; to the west, the Mediterranean to the horizon. Below, the black beach and, somewhere in the rock, the water still flowing. Science doubts ; Nonza keeps the spring.