Birth of the city
The history of Livorno began properly in the last decades of the sixteenth century, thanks to the expansionist policies of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany. The old Porto Pisano was silted up, so the Castle of Livorno with its wealth of landing places was to become within a few years the Grand Duchy’s prosperous and rationally-planned port on the Mediterranean.
Construction work on the harbour and the town went on for decades, but the inhabitants were few (only 530 in 1591); Grand Duke Ferdinando I found a solution for populating his beautiful, beloved town. He enacted the Leggi Livornine (1591-93), a series of laws that granted anyone who would come to live in Livorno tax exemptions, freedom of religion and protection from the Inquisition. “To all you Merchants of Whatsoever Nation, Levantines, Westerners, Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, Germans and Italians, Jews, Turks, Moors, Armenians, Persians … we grant ... real, free and extensive safe-conduct and freedom and authorisation to come, stay, trade, pass through and live with your families…”. So the local people were joined by a large number of Sephardic Jews, who had suffered persecution in Spain and Portugal, in addition to Armenians, British, Dutch and Greeks. In 1609 Livorno had 5,000 inhabitants; twenty years later, in 1629, the number had risen to 14,000. These peoples with their baggage of customs and traditions settled in the hospitable city, where they embarked on artisanal and commercial activities side by side with the locals in a harmony that was slowly attained, aided no doubt by the general prosperity stemming from the Grand-ducal facilitations. In 1676, the town was declared a “free port”, but, under a “free benefit” provision, the situation already was that import and export duties had not been paid for a century. This raft of privileges brought about the rapid and exponential development of the town, which would come to a halt, however, when, just after the Unification of Italy (1861), the concession of free ports was abolished throughout the whole country; as a result, many merchants were to leave Livorno.