I don't know much about the “Silos Ardenza”: it is a battery of tall grain silos inside the cargo port, visible from almost everywhere in town.
The huge structure has nothing to do with the quarter of Ardenza, practically on the opposite side of Livorno.
In a quite remote corner of the “Villa Fabbricotti” park we can see a sculpture representing Leda and the Swan that was once part of a beautiful fountain.
In the early years of 1900, Pedro Alessandro Bossio, the honorary consul of Argentina, became the new owner of “Villa Attias”. Both the building and the park were restored and enriched, the fountain was commissioned to the sculptor Luigi Brizzolara.
In an old photo of the villa, the fountain is clearly visible.
In 1968 the villa was demolished to make room for new buildings and for what is now “Piazza Attias”. The basins and the sculpture were moved to the place where now they stand.
An olive tree around here? May be, but we can't really find it...
A street light in “Piazza della Repubblica”. Another detail here.
Old fashioned (and rusty) chairs outside a bar in “Piazza Attias”.
A swing carousel for kids in “Piazza XX Settembre”.
You can find some Florida in the “Fosso Reale”.
Our forlorn Grand Duke spent almost a century in storage and a few decades surrounded by the former “Mercatino Americano”. At last Leopold II is free to stand in the middle of a cleared “Piazza XX Settembre”, just in front of the church of “San Benedetto”. We don't know yet if this square will become a new “Place d'Italie”, whatever that may mean in the minds of our city planners.
The monument is a work of our fellow citizen, the sculptor Paolo Emilio Demi. It was damaged in the riots of 1849, but now needs only some cleaning from more recent outrages.
The unfinished bas-relief on the basement is the work of another local sculptor, Enrico Mirandoli (1810-1891).
“Le notti bianche” (White Nights) is a film by the director Luchino Visconti, based on a short story by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The movie, starring Maria Schell, Marcello Mastroianni and Jean Marais, won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1957.
A peculiarity of this movie is that the story is set in a derelict post-war Livorno, plausibly reconstructed in Rome's Cinecittà Studios.
The action, not much of it considered the kind of film, takes place mostly in the quarter of “Venezia Nuova” (New Venice), with its canals and bridges slightly beautified. It is hard to recognize any real place, but they caught quite well the essence of it.
