population of the city throughout the centuries maintained an oral tradition that had originally been Roman. Nineteenth-century travellers could point to the Hill of San Giovanni on the northwest shore of the Gulf of Ajaccio, which still had a cathedral said to have been the 6th century seat of the Bishop of Ajaccio. The Castello Vecchio ("old castle"), a ruined citadel, was believed to be Roman but turned out to have Gothic features. The hill was planted with vines. The farmers kept turning up artifacts and terracotta funerary urns that seemed to be Roman.
In the 20th century the hill was covered over with buildings and became a part of downtown Ajaccio. In 2005 construction plans for a lot on the hill offered the opportunity to the Institut national de recherches archéologiques preventatives (Inrap) to excavate. They found the baptistry of the 6th century cathedral and large amounts of pottery dated to the 6th and 7th centuries AD; in other words, the early Christian town. A cemetery had been placed over the old church. In it was a single Roman grave covered over with roof tiles bearing short indecipherable inscriptions. The finds of the previous century had included Roman coins. This is the only evidence so far of a Roman city continuous with the early Christian one.
Genoese foundation
For more details on this topic, see History of Corsica#Renaissance.
The present town of Ajaccio was founded in 1492 3 kilometres (2 mi) south of the Christian village by the Bank of Saint George atGenoa, which dispatched Cristoforo of Gandini, an architect, to build it. He began with a castle on Capo di Bolo, around which he constructed residences for several hundred people. The new city was essentially a colony of Genoa. The Corsicans were restricted from the city for some years, even though they had requested the services of the bank as peace-keeper and problem-solver.
From origin to annexation
The Republic of Genoa was
