Il Dolce Viaggio: Pisa and Livorno

We woke up bright and early in Lucca Tuesday morning and bought some chocolate cornetti for the kids at one of the cafes on Piazza dell'Anfiteatro. We hoped to find something for ourselves in the walled city's covered market Mercato del Carmine but it was closed and undergoing renovations, which apparently had been stuttering along for some years. I wasn't interested in climbing the Torre Guinigi or walking along the bike path atop the city walls so we decided to begin our day trip right away.

Our journey through Tuscany wouldn't have been complete without a visit to one of Italy's most famous individual sights, the leaning tower of Pisa. The campanile of the Pisa cathedral began to sink soon after its construction began in the late twelfth century due to unstable subsoil and an insufficiently deep foundation. Unwilling to abandon the project, local authorities continued to add floors in fits and starts with various efforts being made to overcome the developing tilt by shifting its center of mass. Once the tower was complete it continued to tilt very gradually, confounding efforts to straighten it in 1838 and 1934. In 1989 after the fatal collapse of the Civic Tower of Pavia the risk was deemed critical and the tower was closed from 1990 to 2001. During this time the problem was addressed by adding extensive counterweight to the north side of the tower as well as removing soil from beneath that part of the base. The project was carefully designed so as not to eliminate the tilt completely, as this was now considered an essential historical feature of the tower and the reason for its uniqueness and appeal. At the conclusion of the process the tower's inclination was reduced to four degrees from greater than five, similar to the tilt that it had two centuries previously, and it is now considered to be safe for the next two to three hundred years. The leaning tower's fame has far eclipsed the repute of the structures around it but it is important to remember that it is only the campanile of Pisa's beautiful marble cathedral which was completed in 1092, nearly a century before construction began on the tower. The expansive piazza that includes the cathedral, tower, and equally magnificent baptistery is informally known as Piazza dei Miracoli, a term coined by Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio who called the square "a meadow of miracles".

No one knows who started the trend of forced perspective photos at the leaning tower but over the years it has become THE thing to do during a visit to Piazza dei Miracoli. We arrived from Lucca at around ten in the morning, long before the peak tourist crush, but there were still tourists standing on every available bollard attempting to get that perfect shot of themselves holding the tower up or palming its upper level. From other angles the subjects look like a line of individuals imitating statues or performing strange yoga poses and has become a meta-attraction in its own right. Perhaps one day there will be a trend of taking photos of people taking photos of people doing forced perspective photos of the leaning tower of Pisa. Of course we made our own half-hearted attempt but didn't have the patience to get the angle and the hand position exactly right.

We were careful not to ignore the other parts of the complex while focusing exclusively on the tower in the way that visitors to Pisa are famous for. The facade of the cathedral bore some resemblance to the church of San Michele in Foro in Lucca, boasting four levels of loggia but without the ornately designed columns. The lower level had the advantage over San Michele in Foro with colored marble panels, molded bronze doors, and elaborate lunettes above the doors with religious themes. The baptistery is the largest in Italy and like the cathedral displays the classic Tuscan Romanesque style of black and white striping. Its original architect was Diotisalvi but a century later the work was continued by Nicola Pisano, considered to be one of the earliest forebears of the Italian Renaissance in sculpture.

Fortunately we had plenty of time to explore the historic center of Pisa rather than just zipping in and out to see the tower. The main pedestrian street leading from Piazza dei Miracoli to the center is Via Santa Maria. After following this colorful street for a couple of blocks we decided to take a left and soon found ourselves in Piazza dei Cavalieri. This square was the political center of medieval Pisa and is dominated by the sixteenth century Palazzo della Carovana. This sgraffito-covered building was once the headquarters of the military organization Knights of St. Stephen, established by the Medici in 1561. Adjacent to the palazzo is the church of Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri.

My sources indicated there was a daily market in Piazza delle Vettovaglie, so we headed in that direction and discovered an interesting warren of pedestrianized streets. The wide sidewalks were protected from the elements by porticos with cloister vault ceilings. Alas when we reached the piazza there was no market to speak of, just one or two lonely produce vendors.

Shortly afterward we spilled out of the center onto the street that ran along the bank of the Arno. Florence's famous river also runs through Pisa, countless serpentine turns after passing under the Ponte Vecchio. Here we were just a few miles from the mouth of the river where it empties into the Tyrrhenian Sea. This was quite a beautiful stretch of road, comparing quite favorably to the nondescript surroundings of Rome's Tiber. As we walked downstream we passed blocks full of tall and dignified buildings with interesting facades such as the brick and terra cotta Palazzo Agostini.

The Arno was crossed at regular intervals by low, two lane bridges. As we reached the last bridge before the street where we had parked we saw a small but exquisitely beautiful marble church on the opposite bank. This was the church of Santa Maria della Spina which was built in the early thirteenth century while the leaning tower was still being constructed. The church looks like a miniature cathedral, although it is more Gothic in design than the typically Romanesque cathedrals of Tuscany.

I had penciled in Livorno as an optional city and I hadn't really expected to make it there, given how short a time we were staying in Lucca. Having decided not to do more exploration of Lucca that morning and having made fairly short work of Pisa, it was clear we would have more than enough time to visit Livorno after all. Since we had been disappointed by the closed market in Lucca our top priority was to visit the highly recommended Mercato delle Vettovaglie, also known as Mercato Centrale. The market shares its name with the open air market in Pisa because vettovaglie is the local term for provisions or supplies. In the 1850's, Victor Baltard's revolutionary glass and iron design for Les Halles in Paris became a new standard for public market buildings in Western Europe. Italian architect Angiolo Badaloni was strongly influenced by Les Halles when he conceived the new market building for Livorno in the late nineteenth century. The completed structure became the largest covered market in Italy at the time and and well-known landmark of the city. Outside of the massive market building there was a forest of stalls selling mostly dry goods and clothing.

The spacious market had the best selection of food that we had seen since San Benedetto in Cagliari. The delicatessens were particularly impressive with tempting arrangements of salumi and cheese in refrigerated display cases made of pristine tempered glass. The seafood section was quite extensive as well, unsurprising as Livorno is an important port city. The Beaux Arts architectural style was more impressive when experienced inside the market. The market wasn't particularly busy on a Tuesday afternoon but that was preferable to a dealing with a preponderance of tourists and the type of vendors who catered to them.

The kids hadn't eaten anything but the breakfast pastries that morning and were getting quite hungry. Since Livorno is not a touristy city there weren't many options for eating inside the market. It's always hard to find things the kids like at the delis but fortunately there was a place that mainly sold freshly made pasta but also had a small menu of prepared dishes.

We left the market through the rear entrance where we fortuitously encountered a shellfish vendor who was busily dispensing oysters on the half shell along with his other goods to a larger crowd of customers than we had seen at any of the indoor stalls. Mei Ling and I had barely eaten anything the whole day and we weren't about to let that opportunity pass us by. The vendor was very good-natured and curious and was quite surprised to hear we were American. Not many Americans make it to the market in Livorno, I suppose. The guy barely spoke a word of English so I practiced my Italian with him while he shucked our oysters. Ian ended up eating most of them.

Aside from my diet, the reason I hadn't eaten more than a few bites at King of Pasta was that I wanted to save room for cacciucco, the signature tomato-flavored seafood stew of Livorno. I was trying to identify a restaurant while our oysters were being prepared but I wasn't having much luck finding a place open for lunch on a Tuesday. The shellfish vendor couldn't think of any specific spot besides the ones I had already ruled out. Eventually we just walked down one of the busier commercial streets until we found a promising place called Osteria Red which offered a version of the stew which used boneless chunks of fish instead of the customary whole fish that was hacked up and thrown into the pot bones and all. Apparently this was such a culinary heresy that they had to change the name of the dish slightly on the menu. Regardless of the spelling I wasn't a big fan of the dish compared to a Spanish zarzuela or a Portuguese cataplanas. I found the tomato and wine base of the sauce to be overly acidic and the seafood ended up with a slightly rubbery texture. Perhaps there were better versions but the one at Osteria Red seemed to be highly esteemed in the reviews.

One of the major attractions for visitors to Livorno is the Venezia Nuovo neighborhood. In the early seventeenth century the Medicis directed construction of a new residential neighborhood surrounding two of their forts in the area of the port. Part of this area was submerged and they hired specialists from Venice to build foundations under water and construct a network of canals to permit easy movement around the area. This area was largely spared from the bombings that destroyed much of Livorno during World War II and retains a colorful, Renaissance-flavored atmosphere. As Livorno has a largely unfounded reputation as a gritty port city with little charm there were few tourists to be seen as we wandered through the artificial islands created when the canals were excavated.

At the heart of Venezia Nuova is Fortezza Nuova, so named because it was the second of two Medici forts to be built in the sixteenth century. The fort occupies the entirety of the polygonal island on which it sits and enhances the sense of antiquity of the neighborhood. The exterior view of the imposing brick walls is likely the most interesting aspect for visitors as the internal buildings within the fort were demolished by bombing during the war.

The charm of Venezia Nuova had awakened our interest in exploring the rest of the old town. Livorno appeared to be much more than a market and a canal district. We walked back south in the direction of the market along pedestrianized Via della Madonna, which was the most lively streets we had seen thus far with many locals enjoying apertivos in outdoor cafes. This time we turned east on the major shopping street Via Grande which was lined mostly with Rationalist buildings that were favored during the postwar reconstruction of the city. This trend proved unpopular among cultural purists who believe the old town has degraded its architectural heritage, but I enjoyed walking under the shady porticos of these more modern additions to the city.

Continuing along busy Via Grande we came to a magnificent neoclassical building of golden sandstone with a large semicircular apse. This was the Cisternino di Città, constructed in the nineteenth century to house a water tank that would supply the city center. It speaks volumes to the aesthetics of the time that such a splendid building would be devised for such a mundane purpose. For various reasons the tank never came into use and the building has been repurposed as a cultural center and exhibition hall. It would have been easy to spend a few moments to appreciate the beauty of the structure, snap a couple of photos, and move on as I did so frequently but something caused me to pause here for a little longer. There was something provoking me here that I couldn't quite put my finger on and I didn't want to ignore it. This was a perfect moment to channel my inner Anthony Doerr and I focused on absorbing every detail of what I was seeing rather than the shorthand version that my brain naturally gravitated to. After a few minutes of this the realization came to me that what truly made this building distinctive and beautiful to me wasn't so much its golden color or appealing shape but the uneven decay of its smooth facade. There were irregular patches and segments of rough stone of an endless variety of shape and depth that conveyed a tremendous sense of character onto the building. I had been seeing variations on this theme throughout our travels in Italy without truly comprehending that this was the core of the antiquated appeal of these invisible cities. The Italians allowed the surfaces of their old buildings to degrade and sometimes even whimsically imitated it in new designs because it represented their cultural heritage, the sort of graceful aging that one might associate with a maturing but beloved cinema icon. The facade of the cistern was telling me a story that began two hundred years ago, a story of ambition and progress tempered by centuries worth of wind, rain, and changing temperature. The history of Italy can be read on these walls just as easily as it can be read in textbooks and museum exhibits, and perhaps with deeper understanding. I took a close-up photo of the wall with the idea that perhaps this effect could be somehow reproduced artistically by creating a wall of similar material and figuring out a way to artificially age it. For the rest of the trip I remained much more aware of the variety of these degraded surfaces and created a catalogue of photos, but I still haven't figured out if or how I will put it to use.

The city center is surrounded on canals on every side except for a short isthmus to the east which is occupied almost entirely by the Piazza della Repubblica. The enormous oval was almost entirely empty save for two marble statues of former Medici grand dukes of Tuscany. It was quite an uncomfortable place to be with the mid-afternoon sun reflecting off the whitish gravel surface and there wasn't much to see on the periphery. The city now seemed to have entered fully into the lull between lunch and dinner and it seemed like the right time to depart.

At this point it was just mid-afternoon and we didn't feel like heading back to Lucca yet. Even though we had only walked around the walled town for a couple of hours the previous night we had the feeling that we'd gotten a pretty good sense of what the city was about. It had the feel of a place that had wonderful architecture and history but didn't really have much local energy within. I wondered how many of those old apartments housed year round residents or if they were predominantly Airbnb's. It certainly seemed like most of the people we had encountered in the streets were visitors and the real Luccans all lived outside the walls. I interrogated my new favorite travel tool ChatGPT about other interesting towns within driving range of Livorno and Lucca and the most interesting option it came up with was Pietrasanta, a name I hadn't come across at all in my pre-departure research. It was an artist's town inland from the Versilia Riviera, not that far from Carrara. It was almost an hour north from Livorno but driving in Tuscany wasn't unpleasant at all and it would only take us another half hour to get back to Lucca afterwards. Pietrasanta was a sprawling municipality but all the things of interest to travelers were in the tiny centro storico at the base of the foothills of the Apuan Alps. We did pass some interesting businesses on the way into town which had yards full of marble blocks, statues, and some very large fruits that appeared to be fashioned from bronze.

Once we had parked in the convenient lot just outside the old town it didn't take us long to discover Pietrasanta's quirky individualism. On the sidewalk in front of us a life-sized figure of a boy leaned back against the pillar of a drab modern building, staring wide-eyed at a cell phone that he gripped with both hands. Ian and Spenser automatically gravitated to him just as they do when they encounter an actual living boy with a device in his hands. A plaque by the statue's feet warned that excessive use of a smartphone is bad for one's health.

We began to walk through the narrow streets of this very charming town, noting that while there were few pedestrians the centro storico didn't have that same desolate, abandoned atmosphere we had noted in Carrara. We soon reached Piazza del Duomo in the very center of the old town. The duomo was a dignified marble building with some impressive bas reliefs sculptures on the facade and a single intricate rose window. In the square there was a temporary installation of sculptures that appeared to be modernistic marble columns with traditional Tuscan Romanesque black and white stripes that had been geometrically twisted and also fractured lengthwise. We had no idea of the significance of these sculptures but the visual effect was quite dramatic.

It soon became clear to us that sculpture was the lifeblood of Pietrasanta. Carrara is the most famous name in the region for marble but Pietrasanta has its own quarries and was a frequent hangout for Michelangelo, who has been adopted as a patron saint by the town. The center was filled with galleries and cafes that provided the streets with the vitality that had been missing in Carrara. Sculpture and art were present in every public space and it was clear that local authorities went to great lengths to cultivate a sense of creativity and innovation.

We spent a couple of hours in Pietrasanta browsing through galleries and discovering sculptures in unexpected places. It didn't take very long to explore the entire centro storico which consisted of only three parallel streets, but we felt very uplifted at the conclusion. It would have been nice to have dinner at one of the appetizing outdoor restaurants that we passed but it would be another hour before the first one opened and we were ready to get back out on the road.

On the way back to Lucca we were considering what to eat and I couldn't say I was eager to have Italian food yet again. Cleo had been clamoring for Japanese the previous night and we hadn't been able to find anything in the walled city that was open. Tonight we had our wheels and much more flexibility so we drove to a sushi place way out on the edge of town. Even though it was Japanese cuisine, the waiters and management were Chinese. I didn't find the food very good at all but the rolls arrived on a golden Ferris wheel which delighted the kids. Once we returned to the center we went straight back to the Airbnb, so in the end we only explored the walled town of Lucca for a couple of hours despite spending two nights there. I'm not sure we gave the city a fair chance but it definitely wasn't one of our favorite stops despite its reputation for historical charm.