Saorge chooses its people

I have developed a theory that Saorge is self-selecting. By that, I mean that this petite village seems to beckon certain people and repel others. My family’s own history marks an example: We first visited here in 2017, and I was quite taken with this medieval citadel town, home to fewer than 500 inhabitants. It’s a multi-cultural polyglot of individuals, most of them intelligent, many of them artistic. The multi-colored cobblestone streets of the no-car village are quaint and pleasing to the eye, and the blocks of jade and purple stone taken from the local quarries that make up many of the staircases and doorsteps are magnificent. It gives me goosebumps to learn that the only other place in the world that has these particular stones is Brazil. Continental drift much?

After our initial visit, when we realized we liked this placid aerie more than we liked our visits to Florence, Venice, and Genoa, I told Andie wistfully that I wished

we could live here. That seemed highly improbable at the time, but circumstances changed when Andie was diagnosed with breast cancer. At that point, she was more open to a significant change in our lives, and we began planning how we might carve out a year to live in France. Since our son attended a French immersion school in Kansas City, we figured he would be fine. We began studying French on Duolingo and Andie began compiling the daunting amount of paperwork that would be necessary for such a move.

It was scary, but within weeks of our move we were enchanted with the place. We had been here about six months when we realized we wanted to stay longer, and decided to add a year to our stay. That led to buying a little apartment to secure a more permanent foothold here. At this point, we are splitting our time between France and the United States.

Our friends Jim and Mala were similarly enchanted five years ago, when they drove up into the mountains from Monaco to escape the heat on their European vacation. They paused their ascent in Saorge, and rented a place for the night. It was love at first sight. They came back a year later, bought the house in which they had stayed, and have been here ever since. This couple hails from New York, and they are, respectively, in their mid-70s and mid 80s. They fit right in here, where people of respectable age, many of them octogenarians, hike the mountains casually and easily.

Oh the mountains. They aren’t big, like the Rockies, but they are picturesque as hell, accented by a lovely jade river that forms part of the breathtaking view from many of the balconies and windows in town.

Simon had visited here in his youth, and by the time he was approaching burnout in his 40s asked his sister to help him find a place that met a list of criteria he had in mind. Not surprisingly, at least to me, Saorge emerged as his top choice. He moved here, and it was here he met his future wife, Elizabetta. 

Blanche and Pablo were chosen by Saorge as well. She hails from Paris, and he from Argentina. Did I mention that many people in our little town speak two or three languages? Mala speaks eight , but that is a story for another time.

This couple has traveled extensively around the world, since Pablo is a professional musician. Like us, they fell in love with Saorge. They lived for five years in Argentina, and Blanche relates how they were living on a beach in Brazil, captivating and gorgeous, when she found herself online every day looking for apartments for sale in Saorge. They moved here in December of 2019. Which means, like us, they have weathered both COVID-19 confinement and our devastating river tsunami, known as Tempete Alex. Alex left countless broken roads and bridges in his wake, and we all hunkered down and lived off supplies flown in by helicopter for several months. Now we are used to the strange new routes we must take to get out of town, but the scars left by Alex endure: solid stone bridges cracked into pieces, landslides that took part of the terrain and some houses with it, huge trees thrown up on shore like so much kindling.

But Saorge still looks like Saorge, and most of us remained here after the devastation. Blanche told us a little history of her sister, whom she had invited to town to stay at her place while she and Pablo were on a road trip. The sister came, hated it and the inhabitants, and promptly left. Saorge clearly rejected her.

My own sister came to visit the autumn before Covid, and loved it instantly. She is eager to return. If she were not encumbered by a partner and two dogs, I think she might consider making the move.

If my French were polished enough, and I were less introverted, I would probably have finagled more stories out of people in town who were drawn here. Like our friend Ewan, a burly hard-drinking Scot who is acutely intelligent and funny. Or Olivier and Ronnie, who own the local café and bookshop and came here after more than six years running a hotel in Chile. Or our dear friend Julien, tall and handsome, ridiculously kind, who was the local mail carrier here before he transferred to a town an hour away. We were afraid we were going to lose him, but he decided to buy a place in Saorge and make the long commute in order to stay here.

Saorge seems to have a subtle magnetic effect on us, our interior ore drawn to it like a lodestone. I am not adventurous and I am a self-conscious person, so it still amazes me that I pulled up roots and took the plunge. I have not regretted it for an instant, and I am supremely happy with the independence and quickening intelligence the town has elicited from our son. It’s quite the bonus.