Hidden Livorno

Description

A journey through subterranean Livorno, through the cellars and crypts below the mighty vaults which support the weight of the city above. We will provide a guided historical tour of this unique, usually inaccessible, architectural system.

The four-hundred year old Medicean city of Livorno was designed to be the Mediterranean’s foremost entrepôt, a giant warehouse to store merchandize from all over the world. In particular, Livorno’s characteristic seventeenth-century quarter, “New Venice” (la Venezia Nuova) was endowed with an extraordinary system of cellars; enormous warehouses with an underground passage to the canals, from which one would access an unexpected subterranean city which runs underneath historic merchant palaces.

It is a bonafide underground city: a place of vanished trades and of legends. For more than three centuries it was secret storehouse for booty, a trove of priceless cargoes captured from exotic locales, taken by Grand Duke of Tuscany’s pirate fleet. Already in the beginning of the eighteenth century it was a favored stop for voyagers on the Grand Tour, who viewed by lantern-light the caverns’ wonders and curious objects, fit to be stored among the collections of European palaces and museums. Our guided tour through this the realm of laborers, sailors, merchants, and all varieties of humanity will reveal the secrets and histories each of these striking places has to tell.