You wouldn’t normally find Corsica on any list of “lucky” places. Since antiquity, the Mediterranean island’s historical narrative has been dominated by onerous tales of rebellion, romanticism and a consistent knack for failing to make profitable use of its strategic position.

Yet Calvi, on Corsica’s northern coast, occupies a small but vital place in the history of modern tourism. It’s all thanks to the intentions of one individual. And no, I’m not thinking of Napoleon, the island’s most famous son. 

More than 75 years ago, a plane chartered by UK-based firm Horizon Holidays took off from London bound for Calvi. The firm was set up by a Russian émigré called Vladimir Raitz, whose idea was to deliver an all-in-one holiday experience in which flights, hotels, food and entertainment were included in a single price.

If you’re thinking, “That sounds like a package holiday to me”, then you’re absolutely right. Raitz demoed this new idea with a group of schoolteachers in 1950. The following year tickets became available to the general public.

Despite its pioneering package-holiday offering, Calvi never became as overrun by tourists as other popular places in the region. Though it had first-mover advantage, Mediterranean glamour, cheap flights and a romantic origin story, the town avoided becoming a relic, a forgotten coastal destination or fly-and-flop resort. 

“We’re pretty busy in summer but a lot of the people who dine here arrive by yacht from the Côte d’Azur,” a local told me as I reclined outside Île de Beauté café eating a salade de chèvre chaud on a recent low-season trip.

Calvi failed – or, for my money, succeeded – due to a mix of geography, politics, culture and sheer awkwardness.

The first puzzle pieces are the mountains that frame the town. Compare the obdurate landscape here with the Costa Blanca’s endlessly buildable coastlines. Then there’s the fact that package tourism lives or dies on cheap access. Calvi might have welcomed those early package-holiday jets but its airport remained small with volatile, weather-dependent landings, limited runway expansion and fewer direct routes.

Then add in the attitude of postwar France, which prioritised domestic tourism and had a preference for small hotels, pensions and campsites. Spain did the exact opposite, welcoming overseas tour operators with open arms. It also invested heavily in airports under Francisco Franco in the 1960s and 1970s.

Wandering around Calvi’s bijou squares and narrow lanes, I couldn’t help but feel that the atmosphere of the place is inimical to mass tourism. Then I read more about who actually went on that maiden Horizon Holidays trip.

As Raitz later recalled in his memoir Flight to the Sun, the people attracted to his idea were not those you might expect. Raitz typified his guests as “The man in the street [who] acquired a taste for wine, for foreign food, started to learn French, Spanish or Italian, made friends in the foreign lands he had visited; in fact [became] more ‘cosmopolitan’, with all that that entailed.”

Based on Raitz’s recollection, it seems that the package holiday began with quixotic ideals before mutating into predictability, big hotels, English breakfasts, familiar nightlife and repeatable experiences.

And yet it’s difficult to identify a single quantifiable way to keep a pretty French coastal town such as Calvi from swapping the auberge for the all-inclusive, or the broody citadel for the bawdy souvenir stand. But it certainly helps to have a lot of mountains in the vicinity – and a motto along the lines of, “Whatever Spain did in the 1960s, let’s be forever grateful that we didn’t.”
 
Rob Crossan is a London-based journalist. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

Further reading:
- As extreme heat threatens Mediterranean holiday resorts, the answer could be over their shoulders

- Managing overtourism doesn’t mean throwing the backpacker out with the bathwater

This year, Eurovision Song Contest fans will have not one but two opportunities to cheer on their favourite nations (writes Fernando Augusto Pacheco). Viewers can tune in to the event’s finale on 16 May in Vienna and on 14 November, when Bangkok will host the first-ever Asian edition.

Ten countries have confirmed their participation in the event so far, including Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Bhutan. International reach has long been a goal of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). In 2022 it attempted to expand to the US with the American Song Contest, which saw performers compete from all 50 states. Despite these efforts, the event was cancelled after just one season. It seems that Americans were not so keen on Ohio versus Oklahoma.

“As we mark the 70th anniversary of the Eurovision Song Contest, it feels especially meaningful to open this next chapter with Asia, a region rich in creativity and talent,” says Martin Green, director of the Eurovision at the EBU. The choice of Bangkok as the first host city is strategic for its prominence as a global hub for art. “This city has always been a place where cultures come together, where music fills the air,” says Chuwit Sirivajjakul, deputy governor for policy and planning at the Thailand Tourism Authority. 

Last year’s Eurovision was watched by a record 166 million people. The addition of the Asian competition will likely bring millions more viewers. Monocle hopes that the event will strike the right chord with some groovy T-pop tunes, danceable Vinahouse (otherwise known as Vietnamese EDM) and a cameo from Lisa.

For more on the song contest, listen to the latest episode of ‘The Briefing’.

Further reading:
- Meet Martin Österdahl, the man making sure Eurovision runs smoothly

During Ollivier Chenel’s early years, his father was an antiques dealer in Nice (writes Lucrezia Motta). But where Chenel Snr specialised in art deco furniture, his son found himself intrigued by much older objects. Alongside his wife, Gladys, he moved to Paris in 1999 to open their first gallery. “We were generalists at the time because it was about making our mark and meeting our first clients,” says Chenel. Over time they started to specialise in antiquities.

Gladys oversees the curation of Galerie Chenel’s softly lit space overlooking the Louvre. Among the pieces that she has currently chosen for display is a marble funerary inscription from the end of the first century, made for a former slave who became a calligraphy instructor. It was discovered by archaeologists in the south of France in the 19th century and is now priced at €480,000. 
galeriechenel.com
 
This piece is from Monocle’s April issue. To discover more of the exquisite items collected by Galerie Chenel, click here.