It Was Now Time
For The English To Appear In Those Waters, And In 1652 They Were
Defeated By The Dutch Off Leghorn.
About seventy-five years later the
grippe paid Leghorn a first visit, and not long after a violent
earthquake
Shook down many buildings and killed many women and children;
but the authorities did what they could to secure the city in future by
declaring the day a perpetual fast, and forbidding masking and dancing
on it.
No disaster worth recording befell the city till Bonaparte came with the
Rights of Man in 1796 and left a French garrison, which evacuated the
place the next year, after having levied a fine of two million francs.
The year after that Nelson occupied it with eight thousand English
troops, and the following year the French reoccupied it and sacked the
churches and imposed another fine nearly as great as the first. After
the Napoleonic victories in the Italian wars, they seem to have come
back again and fined the city two million francs more. They now remained
five years, and in the mean time a Livornese, Giovanni Antonio Giaschi,
invented a submarine-boat for attacking and destroying war-vessels, and
a Spanish ship brought the yellow-fever. In 1808 Napoleon gave all
Tuscany, and Leghorn with it, to his sister Elisa, but when in 1814 he
was deposed, Leghorn was restored to the Tuscan grand-dukes and
garrisoned for them by German troops, an earthquake having profited by
the general disorder meantime to pay it another visit. The grand-duke
now being driven out of Florence by Murat, he took refuge at Leghorn,
which fell a prey to an epidemic of typhus. The first steam-vessel
appared there in 1818, and in 1835 the Asiatic cholera; in 1847 a
telegraphic line to Pisa was opened.
In 1848 the revolutions prevalent throughout Europe had their effect at
Leghorn. The citizens shared in the uprising against the grand-duke, and
elected among its representatives F. D. Guerrazzi, once famous as the
first of Italian novelists and a man of generous mind and heart, who
duly suffered arrest and imprisonment when the grand-duke was restored
by the Austrians. He was sentenced to fifteen years' prison with hard
labor, but later his sentence was commuted to exile. He lived to return
and take part in the Italian unification in 1860, and in 1866 he led the
movement against making peace with Austria unless all her
Italian-speaking provinces were ceded to Italy. He died in 1873, and is
remembered in Leghorn by a monument very ineffective as a whole, but
singularly interesting in certain details.
I have omitted from this catalogue of events many of peaceful interest,
such as visits from popes, princes, and poets, and I am not sure I have
got in all the plagues and earthquakes. Perhaps I have the more
willingly suppressed a few war-like facts, in the interest of the
superstition I had cherished that Leghorn was without a history, or that
it had no more history than, most American cities of equal date with its
commercial importance, which began with the wise hospitality of the
Medici to merchants of all races and nations, religions and races,
settled there, and especially to the Spanish Jews who came in great
numbers to the city that it was a common saying that you had as well
strike the duke as strike a Jew in Leghorn.
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