Livorno

Livorno is the Tuscan city that refuses to be a postcard, and wears that like a badge.

It is a working port on the coast, Tuscany's third-largest city, built by the Medici as an ideal town and still earning its living from the sea. Where the rest of the region trades on medieval perfection, Livorno offers something rawer and more workaday: Venetian-style canals through the old Venezia Nuova quarter, sea-battered fortresses, the grand checkerboard Terrazza Mascagni looking out over the water, and the Mercato Centrale, one of the great covered markets in Italy, piled with the fish that becomes the city's famous cacciucco stew. This is a lived-in place with a salty, unpretentious character, beauty that shows up in markets and sea light rather than in monuments.