From His Day, If Not From His
Work, The Prosperity Of Leghorn Began, And The English Have Always Had A
Great Part In It.
Early in the nineteenth century there were a score of
great British merchants settled there, and, though afterward they
Declined in number, the trade with England did not decline, and the
trade with America has always been such that American merchants and
captains have fully shared in the commerce directly or indirectly. Both
the old and the new port were a scene of pleasant activity the pleasant
afternoon when I visited them, and were full of varied sail as well as
many steamers, loading or unloading for or from the Mediterranean ports,
east and west, and the Hanse-atic cities and the far coasts of Norway.
Any seaport is charming and full of romantic interest, but an Italian
port has always a prime pictur-esqueness. Its sailors are the most
ancient mariners, and they look full of history, and capable, each of
them, of discovering a continent. I cannot say that I saw any nascent
Columbus in the tanned and tarry company I met, but I do not deny that
there was one. Leghorn is still in her lusty youth, being not much older
than our Boston in the prosperity which has not failed her since the
Medici divined her importance toward the close of the sixteenth century,
and fortified her harbor till she was one of the strongest places on the
Mediterranean. With a hazy general consciousness of her modernity in
mind, I had imagined her yet more modern, and I was somewhat surprised
to read, in a rather airy and ironical but very capable local guidebook
called _Su e Giu per Livorno_ (or _Up and Down Leghorn),_ that the place
was settled twenty-six hundred and fifty-six years before Christ.
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