02/08/2026
"For this church, the master masons used a dark green stone from the bed of the nearby Bevinco river, a kind of serpentine marble with a compact grain, easy to work."
— Geneviève Moracchini-Mazel, Corse Romane (Zodiaque, 1972.
Who was Geneviève Moracchini-Mazel?
A French archaeologist and art historian (1926–2014), she is the scholar who, more than any other, built the scientific understanding of Corsica's Romanesque and paleochristian heritage. Having earned her degree in art history and archaeology at the Sorbonne in 1958, she began excavating Mariana that same year, a site she discovered and studied for over thirty years. Her main doctoral thesis, devoted to Corsica's Romanesque churches, and the subsequent publication of "Corse Romane" in 1972 — the 37th volume in the renowned Zodiaque collection — placed the island's Romanesque monuments for the first time alongside the great European provinces with comparable architectural heritage.
She excavated most of Corsica's Romanesque sites and catalogued over 1,200 sanctuaries built between the beginning of the Christian era and the 12th century. Becoming a permanent member of the CNRS in 1967, she founded FAGEC (Federation of associations and groups for Corsican studies) in 1970, along with the journal "Cahiers Corsica," dedicated to the island's antiquity, paleochristian period, and medieval history.
Her work was never purely academic: she devoted her entire life to Corsica's medieval heritage, working to make it known and, above all, to safeguard it — at a time when many of these churches risked being lost to the maquis. Her name remains inseparable not only from the history of European Romanesque art, but from the very construction of a Corsican cultural identity aware of its own medieval heritage.
