Femin’isula: Corsican Women on Display at the Museum of Corsica in Corte

From 24 May to 30 December 2025, the Museum of Corsica in Corte hosts an exhibition dedicated to Corsican women. Its title: Femin’isula. A journey through the identity, history, role, position, and emancipation of Corsican women from prehistory to the present day. An exhibition that opens the door to an understanding of the Corsican woman within her Mediterranean world, shaped by island-specific features that have forged both a sacred image and, often, a sacrificial figure.

She wears a long, dark dress topped with an apron, signifying that this woman is perpetually in work attire. Her head is covered with a black kerchief, often a sign of long mourning for a loved one (rarely is the fabric colourful). She balances a heavy terracotta jug on her head. The need for balance gives her a noble, almost aristocratic bearing. This is the iconic image of the Corsican woman that marks the beginning of the exhibition. As usual, I didn’t follow the curators’ suggested route and was immediately drawn to this late 19th-century photograph. A silhouette of a woman who could just as easily be Sardinian, Sicilian, Elban, or Calabrian.

The Mediterranean has shaped similar bodies: women of the mountains or the sea—shepherdesses, spinners, potters, and barefoot fishmongers—thus creating a shared culture and a unique heritage. Opposite, a display case shows luxurious, colourful, embroidered garments once worn by elegant bourgeois women. A class contrast, revealing different lives, where the hardships of rural life and working women from the towns stand in stark contrast to the charm and refinement of salon life. They are mothers, wives, sisters, aunts, cousins—rulers of the household—but they are also the first to bear the weight of poverty.

The exhibition gently guides us, as if to remind us that progress for women has been and continues to be a slow march. Bodies that gradually adopt modern clothing, erasing some social inequalities through appearance. Female painters like Hortense De Luri-Flach or Leonor Fini, who chose Nonza as the place to express her art, but only in summer. All of them came from the bourgeoisie. Elected women, like Anna Maria Natali, long-time mayor of Borgo, her portraits prominently displayed. Women of the Resistance: Danielle Casanova, who died in Auschwitz; Maria de Peretti della Rocca, who perished in Ravensbrück; or Noëlle Vincensini, deported to Ravensbrück and liberated in April 1945. She passed away just a few weeks ago at the age of 98. Portraits of women fighters whose sacrifice anchored Corsica in national history.

Women of the arts who once sang of the island on great national and international opera stages; women of the Riacquistu who revolutionised polyphonic music. Women of today who raise their voices against the mafia, against the drugs ravaging island society and killing their children. Women of today, still fighting for their emancipation. An exhibition of over 300 works—portraits, objects, photographs, sculptures, stories, newspapers, posters—offering a journey through time and space, through the present condition of Corsican women and of Corsica itself, whose story continues…

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Article written by Petru Luigi Alessandri for CorsicaOggi.com. We warmly thank Petru Luigi for kindly allowing us to publish this English version and share this fascinating insight into Corsican women’s history and identity.