Livorno vista dal mare: l'evoluzione fortificatoria del waterfront portuale

Today port areas are definitively separated from the city centre and during the centuries they have acquired independence different from the past. The urban identity, like its form, encompassed that of the port and was completely integrated with it. We can clearly find this organicity not only in the planimetric representations, views, and portolan descriptions of harbours from the Middle Age until the 19th century, but also in treatises, which from Vitruvius – a compulsory source since the modern era - via Leon Battista Alberti, include the harbour in the city’s public buildings. The port, seen as an architecture, as a unique project that fits into the overall design of the city, remained until the beginning of the 19th century. In this sense, Livorno is a unique case. From the Middle Age, as part of the construction of the Pisan maritime defence system, the castle of Livorno was nothing more than the result of a slow evolution of the Pisan port system in relation to which it grew to became its centre. On closer inspection, even when Livorno was only a port with a medieval castle, it was conceived and built as an infrastructure of the city, or rather the outpost of Pisa. The symbiotic connection between the two systems of the city and the port persisted until the mid-19th, when the port organically related to the other parts of the city. The view from the sea is the preferential observation point guiding the analysis of the fortification evolution of the waterfront of the port of Livorno, supported by the reading of historical-iconographic sources and portolan descriptions that, over time, slavishly record the change in the coastal landscape.