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. The
author records this with a smile, and then, by a leap over some forty
centuries, he finds firm footing in the fact that the great Countess
Matilde, then much bothering about in the affairs of her Tuscan
neighbors everywhere, gave the Livornese coasts to Pisa in 1103. This
seems to have been the signal for the Genoese, eleven years later, to
ravage and destroy the Pisan settlements; but later the Pisans,
confirmed in their possession by the Emperor of Germany, rebuilt and
embellished the port.
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