More about Livorno (aka Leghorn), Italy ... Mary's attitudes ... my brief visit in April 1999 ...
Years later, in
1844, Mary would publish a travel book—Rambles
in Germany and Italy—an account of her journey with her son Percy Florence (now in his mid-twenties) back through some of the territory she had first seen with her late husband a
quarter-century earlier. She saw Leghorn only from the deck of her ship, but
she wrote, The view from the sea near
Leghorn is not sufficiently praised.[1] She said nothing at all
about the port itself.
My own brief trip
to Livorno/Leghorn was on April 24, 1999. And here are some excerpts from my
journal that day.
… Livorno
(the English called it Leghorn) is not a happy town, and I was a little on edge
the entire time I was there—just as the city itself appears to be on the edge
between a place that cares and a place that doesn’t. The station is beautiful
(I took a shot of it right at the end of a roll), and I set off on what turned
out to be a long walk—over a mile—down to the waterfront. I didn’t quite make it all the way because of
time—but I saw enough of the old part of the city to get the main idea. I must
keep reminding myself that the Shelleys were here more than 175 yrs. ago—not
much they would recognize, that’s for certain. There were a couple of
interesting parks where I fired a few shots, and I also got some of fishing
boats, pleasure boats, etc. and then I scurried back, arriving about 30 minutes
early—I could’ve gone farther, I guess, but I was running out of gas. Bought
some soda water & crackers in a station shop. Some Italian sailors (I
think) are on board. All of them wear little daggers suspended from belts—they
dangle nearly to the knee and cannot be much more than decorative &
symbolic—if they had to run, I think they’d trip. But they seem nice, eager,
young, and proud, so who am I to utter a discouraging word, eh? I’m really astonished at the dimensions of
vandalism here—the trains are totally defaced w/ spray paint, as are walls,
machinery—even statues in public parks. Coming in the Pisa way, I can really
see how [Livorno] sits at the foot of the mountains.
[1] Travel Writing. In The Novels
and Selected Works, vol. 8 (London: William Pickering, 1996), 341.
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