Discovering one of the touristic “Hidden Treasures” of Livorno
Too often when the tourists arrive to Livorno they spend their hours walking along the boring streets of the city centre or trying to take the first ferry towards Sardinia or Corsica .
But Livorno can show a beautiful piece of history if you are ready to walk along the canals of a borough called “Quartiere Venezia” or even better ready to buy a ticked to visit the house of Amedeo Modigliani ( you need to book in advance ) or Museo Civico Fattori hidden in the beautiful Villa Mimbelli.
The public transport in Livorno is not frequent and there are no many taxis around when the big cruises arrive to the harbour because busy to bring the tourists to the better known Pisa and Florence .
For some particular local regulation there are not Uber taxis or similar companies that you can book with an easy app to move fast and cheap around.
Probably because Livorno is in Italy and the bureaucracy of this country is very slow often created to protect casts of workers and slowing down the modern technology .
But if you are a good walker , you are wearing good trainers , a bottle of fresh water in your bag ,solar cream on your skin and an hat on you head to protect yourself from the powerful Italian sun , with an half an hour of walk you can arrive to Villa Mimbelli from the city centre .
Villa Mimbelli
After an important restoration on the external facades, from 20 December 2018, on the occasion of the official ceremony of restitution to the city, Villa Mimbelli , has returned to shine in its historical architectural grandeur.
The villa in via San Jacopo in Acquaviva was built between 1865 and 1875 by the architect Vincenzo Micheli , commissioned by the wealthy merchant Francesco Mimbelli. In reality, the land was already built on, as a villa inhabited by the Terreni brothers.
The villa, surrounded by a beautiful park , partly converted into vegetable gardens and orchards and partly transformed into a luxuriant park with a great variety of plants, even rare ones, like Palma canariensis(Palma delle Canarie), also present in the other historic villas of the city (Corridi, Maurogordato, Maria, Fabbricotti, Sansoni).
Near his residence, Mimbelli had a vast two-story building erected as a warehouse for his trades to be used as a grain store: the so-called “Granai”.
The beautiful interiors of the villa .
Three large arched openings, which lead directly into the dining and living rooms, which have a fine stucco ceiling, and lunettes frescoed by Annibale Gatti are on the ground floor .
Beautiful mirrors , reflections and statues can be admired in these rooms .
Also on the ground floor, we can admire the beautiful smoking room known as Sala Moresca due to its oriental style, where there are stucco filigrees and polychrome decorations close to the Islamic world.
On the northern side of the villa there is a monumental staircase, decorated with glazed ceramic cherubs, which leads to the rooms on the upper floor where the private apartments of the Mimbelli spouses were located; the staircase, formed by two ramps, is flanked, on the arrival floor, by walls with eighteenth-century style paintings.
Next to the villa is a large shell-shaped fountain and on the other side a chapel, now deconsecrated, obtained in the 1930s from the caretaker’s house, which was later used as a library for the museum.
Museo Civico Fattori
There is a rich collection of local art, like the works of Enrico Pollastrini, a romantic artist still tied to the academy, the highly expressive works of Fattori and other prominent exponents of the Macchiaioli school and of the Postmacchiaioli movement, Guglielmo Micheli, Ulvi Liegi, Oscar Ghiglia, Giovanni Bartolena , Corcos and Mario Puccini.
The origin of the museum dates back to 1877 when the Comune of Livorno founded a Civic Gallery where to collect all the artistic objects kept in several places around the town.
After spending a couple of hours in the museum , villa and park you can have a walk along the Terrazza Mascagni, a wide belvedere facing the Livorno hills, theTuscan Arcipelago and the Livorno Harbour ending in a local restaurant or trattoria of the city centre to taste one of the amazing receipes based on fish and natural ingredients.
by #lauraartist68