Protest at possible Pisan management of Livorno Football Stadium Bar

Armando Picchi Stadium, Livorno10th August 2010

This morning's Il Tirreno, (one of Livorno's local papers) carried a lead article regarding AS Livorno's stadium bar and the possibility that it might soon be managed by a company from Pisa. The legitimate bid by a Pisan contender for the contract to run the Picchi stadium bar has provoked an outrage among Livornese football fans. Threats to the city council have been clearly made in graffiti around the stadium.

No matter that Livorno's shipyard is practically in the hands of Viareggio-based luxury yacht builder Azimut Benetti, that the city's Fortezza Vecchia, hub of cultural events, is being run by Phaedora, a company whose head office is in Modena, that Livorno's new Aquarium is financed by Costa, a company from Genoa, that the newly refurbished 19th-century Grand Hotel Palazzo has been sold out to the Spanish NH Hoteles group, or that the only half-decent English website about Livorno is run by a polemic English woman.

No one gives a monkey's about any of this. What really gets the Livornese angry is the thought of the AS Livorno Armando Picchi stadium bar in the hands of those age-old rivals, the Pisans. God help us!