19km (12 miles) S of Pisa; 95km (59 miles) W of Florence; 315km (195 miles) NW of Rome
Livorno is like a blue-collar Tuscan Venice, a busy port city second only to Florence in size and graced with canals and some of the peninsula's best seafood, as well as a nice seaside promenade that has recently been completely redesigned. Other than that, there isn't much to grab a tourist's attention. The city is perhaps unique in Tuscany because there are few sights to see, no churches to speak of, and just one measly museum of 19th- and 20th-century paintings by artists of the Macchiaioli movement, a Tuscan variant on French Impressionism.
You'll see posters in town of a tower sprouting from pale cobalt-blue waters apparently in the middle of the sea. Actually, this watchtower, Meloria, is resting on a barely submerged reef about 5km (3 miles) offshore. It was here, in 1284, that Genoa's navy thoroughly trounced the Pisan fleet, signaling the beginning of Pisa's slow decline under Genoese maritime dominance.
