Livorno.
Livorno was defined as an "ideal town" at the Renaissance time. Nowadays it reveals its history through its neighbourhoods, crossed by canals and surrounded by fortified town-walls, through the tangle of its streets, which embroider the town's Venice district, and through the Medici Port characteristically overlooked by towers and fortresses leading to the town centre. Designed by the architect Bernardo Buontalenti at the end of the 16th century, Livorno underwent a period of great town planning expansion at the end of the 17th century. Near the defensive pile of the Old Fortress, a new fortress, together with the town-walls and the system of navigable canals, was then built.
Nowadays the Venice district preserves most of its original town planning and architectural features such as the bridges, the narrow lanes, the noblemen's houses and a dense network of canals which once linked the port to its storehouses. In the 18th and 19th centuries Livorno, by then grown up and open to the world, had a lively appearance marked by neo-classical buildings, town parks housing important museums and cultural institutions, Liberty villas with sea views, the market. The town has a cosmopolitan soul and a history of its own. Once it was a cross-roads for the world and home to foreign communities the past existence of which is still witnessed by churches, synagogues and gardens.
Livorno is the birthplace of painters and composers: Amedeo Modigliani, Giovanni Fattori and the Macchiaioli school and Pietro Mascagni. They influenced the development of art all over the world. Important cultural institutions like the town museum Museo Civico Giovanni Fattori are the setting for permanent and temporary painting exhibitions on an international scale. The town museum Museo Mascagnano houses memorabilia, documents and operas by the great composer Pietro Mascagni. Every year some of his operas are traditionally played during the lyric music season, which is organised by the Traditional Theatre of Livorno. Up in the hills the Sanctuary of Montenero, which is dedicated to Our Lady of the Graces, the patron saint of Tuscany, is a fixed destination for pilgrims. It is famous for the adjacent gallery, decorated with ex-voti mainly connected to stories of miraculous sea rescue.