Car Rental Livorno

Livorno; 18km southwest of Pisa, is Tuscany's third largest city and one of Italy's largest ports - a status which invited blanket bombing during World War II. Its rebuilt commercial centre is not pretty, but a poke around the back streets will reveal a network of picturesque canals and hump-backed bridges, a lively streetlife that benefits from a very un-Tuscan ethnic diversity, and plenty of places to sample top-quality seafood . What you won't find are the very things Tuscany is famous for: art, architecture and tourists.

Livorno's port was developed under the Medici . In 1618, they declared it a free port and instituted a liberal constitution which prompted an influx of Jews, Greeks, Spanish Muslims, English Catholics and a cosmopolitan throng of other refugees. Livorno flourished, and attracted a community of English expatriates (including Shelley) whose cack-handed anglicization of the city's name into Leghorn is still in use.

The old Porto Mediceo , has fishing boats spilling back into the canal quarter and unfortunately often a cruise liner blocking the view out to sea. Sangallo's Fortezza Vecchia flanks the harbour, about 100m north of Livorno's sole surviving nod to Renaissance art - the statue of the Quattro Mori , overlooking the busy waterfront road at Piazza Micheli. This bizarre work decorates an inept 1595 statue of Ferdinando I with the addition of four chained Moors by Pietro Tacca (1623), tacked on either as a celebration of the success of Tuscan raids against North African shipping, or merely as slaves cowering beneath Medici glory. Either way they stand as a poignant and shocking harbourside symbol for this multiracial city. The Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori , devoted to Fattori and the late-nineteenth-century Macchiaioli movement, Italy's milk-and-water version of Impressionism, is housed in the extravagant Villa Mimbelli, 1km south at Via San Jacopo in Acquaviva 65 (Tues-Sun 10am-1pm & 4-7pm; L8000/?4.13; bus #1).

The broad Via Grande heads inland to Piazza Grande , which features the Duomo , a postwar reconstruction. Via Cairoli curls around the duomo and partway along, Via Buontalenti leads off to the ochre Mercato Centrale that stands at the heart of a boisterous street-market. The canal near here was the limit of the Medici port city; follow it northeast to the ugly treeless expanse of Piazza della Repubblica on one side, and Piazza XX Settembre on the other. The latter is the home of the Mercatino Americano - a cultural endowment of stationed American troops - that sells army surplus clothing, fishing and camping gear and flick-knives. From the Mercato Centrale, Via della Madonna strikes north into the Venezia district, Livorno's most attractive quarter, with crumbling old tenement buildings and the Fortezza Nuova ringed around by a network of quiet canals. August sees the area come alive for the Effetto Venezia , a free street carnival of jazz and world music.

Bus #2 from the station and Piazza Grande curls up to the hilltop Santuario di Montenero , 6km south, which was a pilgrimage site long before the marshes below were populated. A clutch of stalls and cafés surrounds the eighteenth-century church , and you'll find quiet footpaths and plenty of vantage points. Last bus down is at 8.45pm daily.