Livorno | The City With No Time For You
Tuscany's working port, a few days alone, and the one place in the region that refuses to perform
The bars open early in Livorno, earlier than they have any right to, and on the first morning, I was at one of them before I had fully decided to be awake. The coffee came out night-black, bitter, raw, and hit me like a punch to the chest. The pastry was sweeter than anything I tasted before in Italy, and that says a lot, the kind of breakfast built for a man who is about to spend nine hours hauling something heavy out of the sea or into a ship, and I am not that man, but I drank it the way they drink it and stood at the counter the way they stand at it and let the city start without asking my permission. Sophia was in Hungary, gone for a few days to deal with something at home, and I had done the thing I had wanted to do since the first time we set foot in this place: I had rented a small flat for myself and come down alone, to have the whole of Livorno to myself, to walk it until my legs gave out and find out what it actually is. I don’t do this for many other places, and I could have done this anywhere in Italy, so you have probably the right to think: this will be my enduring love story for Livorno.
We had come the first time as a calculation. We were looking for somewhere to live, a real rental, years rather than months, and Livorno kept showing up on the listings at prices that made no sense. Rooms in the middle of the city for less than you’d pay on the edge of Pisa, far less than Pietrasanta, where we ended up. So we drove down to see what was wrong with it. That is the honest reason people go to Livorno, when they go at all: to find out what’s wrong. Most travelers don’t go at all. To most of Italy and most of the world, Livorno is either a blank on the map or it is the place you pass through to get on a boat, the smell of diesel and the queue for the ferry to Corsica, Sardinia, or Elba, a city you experience entirely as a parking lot with water on the far side. We did that before when we visited friends in Corsica. We came to find the catch. We found it in one afternoon, decided we could not live there, and I drove home quietly in love. I know it is a contradiction, but you will get it why.
Every port has the same body underneath it. The shipyard men, the ferry men, the merchants moving whatever there is to move, and the whole supporting hum of people who feed and serve and repair them, all of it pressed up against the water. They tend to be rough, these cities, raw, a little dangerous or at least remembering when they were, and they all carry the same strange social split: the working class living down in the dense heart of the thing, loud and hard and almost violently friendly, and the money living up and out, in the hills, in quiet houses, the people who own the yards and the firms looking down at the place that makes them rich. An impossible mix of real wealth and the bottom of the ladder, sharing a coastline.
But the bodies are the same, and the faces are all different, and that is the whole interest of them. Marseille runs on a loose French commercial shrug. Genoa stacks merchant palaces over its dockside roughness like a man in a good coat with dirt under his nails. Trieste is all clean Austrian order, a port that files its paperwork. And then there is Livorno, which is something I have not seen anywhere else: the canals and the watery grandeur of Venice crossed with the unfiltered hardness of Genoa and Naples, a city that, for a second, looks as if it might be elegant and then opens its mouth.
I have always loved a place with two natures. The tension is the thing. It makes an atmosphere you cannot manufacture, and it makes the people who grow up inside it strange in the best way, relaxed in a register you don’t find elsewhere, and at the same time wound tight, quick, snapping, ready for anything to come around the corner. It’s the women of my twenties, the femme fatales, intense, a blessed dream at night, a nightmare during the day, a magnetic tension to be together, yet entirely impossible to live with. I would never live in Livorno. And Livorno would be the only place in Tuscany where I would spend some weeks, without a single blink of hesitation, just to be with the city.
I’m older now, and calmer than I was, and the edge that makes Livorno what it is would wear me down inside a season. But I would come here for three days before I’d go to Florence for three days, and it isn’t close. This is the trouble with the famous cities… They are predictable. You already know what Florence will give you before the train stops. Livorno? You cannot predict, and at a certain point in life, that becomes the only quality that matters.
Naples taught me this first. People do the Amalfi Coast and skip Naples, or they go in a guided group for an hour for the pizza and come back rattled by how raw it was. I lived in Naples for weeks once, and those days remain among the best I have had, and the people there are among the finest I have met anywhere in this country, and I love the place without reservation. Naples is the same love story as Livorno. I would never live there. It is exhausting in exactly the way the best things are exhausting, the way that, after a while, you have to walk away from to survive. Livorno has some of that in it. Plus the canals. They are beautiful, by the way.
The way to take a city like this is to take its rhythm from the first hour and not impose your own. So I did what the morning told me to. Coffee at the bar, then down toward the water to stand near the yards and the port and watch men work. This is the great free pleasure of Livorno and the thing I came back for. The ferries slide in and out, the dock is loud, everyone has somewhere to be and something on their shoulder, and it moves like a single organism, a hive with a thousand separate purposes that somehow add up to one. I could watch it for an hour and feel I’d done something with my morning. I spent a lot of that visit around Via Grande and the streets near Piazza Mascagni and Corso Mazzini, which is as close as Livorno comes to having a tourist quarter, which is to say not very close at all.
By lunch, the body wants what the city was built to feed it. Livornese food is sailor food and worker food, heavy and oily and hot with chili, built to put back what a hard morning takes out, and it is almost all from the sea. I will say plainly that Livorno is the best place I know in Italy to sit down and destroy whole plates of fish, and the reason is the obvious one: it is a port, and the thing on your plate was in the water that morning, sometimes still arguing about it an hour before. I was staying near Piazza Orlando, so I ate near there, the small fried things done simply, the triglie alla livornese baked in a sauce so red and sharp it stains the dish. I ate alone most of the trip, which is its own pleasure, a plate of fish and a glass of something cold, and no obligation to speak.
To illustrate the food, quickly, let me give you an analogy. In Pietrasanta, where I live, the seafood is also fresh like in Livorno. We have Viareggio, a smaller port, same harbor concept, you can’t get fish fresher than that. You eat what was alive minutes ago and got caught out at sea an hour ago. But here, we eat it simply. Grill them, fry them, or just raw like sushi. No frills. Minimalism. Plates look wonderful, almost like a minimalistic art form. Closer to the Japanese style of seafood eating. Now, in Livorno, well… I mean this in a very, very good way, but plates are enormous, often messy, there is sauce, massive spices, big bowls of everything, a kilo of bread is usual either on the food, in the food, or next to food, and the “deboning” is a concept that you have to ask for, it’s not normal. Where I live, you eat clean, you leave your table clean. In Livorno, your table looks like a massacre, and your hands feel as if you’ve just come out of the morgue.
For the price of a glass of Chianti, unlock the full Anywhere Italy experience. All of our articles, private stories, and access to our chat travel community.
Start your free 7-day trial.
At night, alone and footsore after miles of the city, I learned the other thing Livorno has that almost nowhere else in Italy does. A good old pub. Not the word, the thing. In most of this country, people drink in cafés or in soft, pretty bars, and the British or German idea of a proper public room with good beer and food, and working people leaning on the bar, simply isn’t part of the culture. Livorno is the exception, because Livorno has the one ingredient that makes a pub a pub, which is a serious quantity of people who have worked all day and want to sit down hard. I found my bar near the same piazza and went back to it. Good beer, decent wine, and, improbably, a kitchen that turned out a plate of octopus that had no business being that good in a place you go mainly to drink.
There is, I should say, almost nothing to see in Livorno, in the museum sense, and I mean that as praise. There is the flat where Modigliani was born, a small Venetian-style fortress, and an aquarium. You can skip all of it without loss. The one thing worth seeing is the central market and the web of canals around it, and you’ll walk into those anyway if you simply walk, which is the only correct way to be in this city. I happened to be there on a weekend, so the streets behind the cathedral were filled with an open market, and I stood in it eating something off a paper and watched Livorno sell things to itself, which is the only audience it has ever really cared about.
And that, finally, is what the city has to offer, the whole of it, the thing that made me quietly in love on the first afternoon and keeps me coming back. Livorno is alive. For the person passing through, Florence is an open-air museum. Venice is a theme park with admission. Rome is the backdrop of a film about Rome. All of those cities are genuinely alive, too, of course, from the inside, for the people who actually live their days in them, but for the traveler, they have learned to hide their ordinary lives behind the glamour, to perform the version you came to see.
Livorno does not perform. It has no fucking time for that. None. Zero time for bullshit. You come here, you get on your ferry, you eat our food, you move. You are probably in someone else’s way anyway. The city is working. It is moving. It is feeding its own. You are welcome to watch, and it will be friendly to you while you do, loud and quick and warm, but it will not slow down or dress up or pretend to be anything other than the hard, salt, living thing it is.
On the last morning, I had the black coffee and the too-sweet pastry again, standing at the counter. I even ordered my coffee with amaro in it. I put my coat on, knowing that I would go to my car, leave the city for Pietrasanta, and for a second, I stupidly expected someone to say “great to see you” or something. But no, of course not, Livorno doesn’t care.
