Stone upon stone: an Italian sojourn: Once a swamp

On a grey and mizzling day we drove to Livorno. It is not the prettiest town in all of Italy, though we found so much of interest here that we stayed engrossed all the day.

Long ago it was a malaria infested marshland frequently flooded by Mediterranean waters and tossed like unwanted booty between Pisa, Genoa and Florence. Livorno can likely thank the Medicis for assuming control in the Middle Ages. They employed engineers to hold back the lowland flood waters and built strong canals that set Livorno up as a decent sized port servicing the Mediterranean.

And while much of its beauty from those days was bombed to bits during the Second World War, much, too, has been repaired and rebuilt.

The old fortress, Fortezza Vecchia, still stands, blocky and substantial, incorporating many of its earlier entities: a Roman military camp or castrum, a small fort built when Pisa controlled the docks, and an ancient keep built by Countess Matilda of Tuscany. All supplanted, though, by a new fort that the Medicis decided to build in the late 17th century, Fortezza Nuova. This was linked to the sea by a series of picturesque canals and waterways earning Livorno the title of "Venice of Tuscany".

Growth and trade did not happen fast enough for the Medicis so they thought to declare Livorno a 'free port', making all goods traded there duty free: thereby attracting an increase in trade. They also offered the right to freedom of religion, even amnesties, encouraging different minorities to settle and trade in Livorno.

That strategy worked. We visited an interesting Jewish Synagogue--new, to replace the bombed one that provided succour to Jewish traders who came in goodly numbers from various countries around the Mediterranean to live in Livorno. The new one is built of reinforced concrete to look like the Bedouin tents in the desert that protected the Tablets of Stone, or the Ten Commandments, as was written in the Book of Exodus. Stained glass windows at one end of the Synagogue are blood red, symbolising the blood shed by Hebrews over time. It is an unusual building hidden almost in a jumble of small streets, back alleys and twisted lanes.

Not far away was a Dutch German Church and a Waldenesian church, so the population was diverse. But, tucked even deeper, almost lost now between a sprawling parking lot and a tall stack of high rise dwellings, we found an Old English Cemetery, which started way back in the late 16th century when the English ran a Naval Base in Livorno in order to patrol shipping routes in the Mediterranean.

Evidently Grand Duke Ferdinand 1 came to a commercial agreement with Elizabeth 1, allowing it. Consequently, a large English population came to live, and die, in the city. The names on the tombstones have attracted a hoard of international visitors over time, including Charles Dickens, who paid his respects to the tomb of a Scottish writer he had admired who had likely retired to Livorno for his health, as so many others had done. Another visitor was James Fenimore Cooper who, while visiting the cemetery, came upon the grave of one of his old seafaring mates from Lake Ontario twenty years earlier. What are the chances of that happening! Sadly, the cemetery is quite tattered now, and seems to be in the hands of volunteers, who likely don't have the time or the money to keep it maintained as it really deserves, given its history.

Livorno has, thanks to the long ago strategy begun by the Medici's, become Italy's second largest port, next to Genoa, and has a very authentic feel to it, making it a really interesting place for us to visit.