Perched high on a rocky spur, the granite-hewn old town of Porto-Vecchio—the cittadella, as it’s known locally—looks down at the mouth of the tiny River Stabiacciu, where it enters the Tyrrhenian Sea. Beneath the cittadella, more recent development sprawls loosely inland behind the 1980s marina and the now-abandoned 18th-century salt pans. Here and there among an unlovely jumble of houses, apartment blocks, parking lots, and supermarkets, pockets of greenery recall an agrarian past when the land around Porto-Vecchio was used to cultivate olive trees and cork oaks. It was on precisely one of these pockets that the municipality planned a 12,900-square-foot multimedia library and cultural center to replace an inadequate 2,500-square-foot facility in the old town. Baptized L’Animu (“spirit” or “breath” in Corsican), it is located next to a district of crumbling social-housing blocks—home to some 1,200 people, half of whom are under 20—thereby bringing cultural and educational services right where they’re needed, since only a tiny percentage of Porto-Vecchio’s 11,000 inhabitants today lives in the cittadella.