Eat Your Way around Livorno!

If you are a lover of Italian food, or just food in general, you can easily spend a day or a weekend in Livorno making your way around a selection of the many cafés, bars, restaurants and market stalls sampling some of the local gourmet specialities.  After all, Italian life rotates around food, so you cannot leave without trying at least a few of the great things to eat and drink.

No visit to Livorno is complete without trying one of the city’s local specialities. Perhaps the most obvious of these, Livorno being a port with lots of fishing activity, is the fish stew known as “Cacciucco”. This rich dish with a tomato base contains five different kinds of fish and served in a soup dish on a thick slice of bread rubbed with garlic. These days the dish is somewhat of a symbol of Livorno.
The term cacciucco is also used locally to refer to a varied mixture of something, rather like the population of Livorno itself with its various foreign communities back in the 16th and 17th centuries.
You can get a good Cacciucco at many of the city’s fish restaurants.
Other Livornese fish dishes include “Triglie alla Livornese” (Livornese red mullet) and Spaghetti al nero (pasta with cuttle fish ink)
Another local speciality, known as “Torta di Ceci”, is a kind of pancake made from chick peas. The batter is poured  into  huge round flat dishes and cooked in the same oven used to make pizzas. Sold by weight, it is traditionally eaten in bread as a “Cinque e Cinque” which refers to the original value of the bread and the torta (5 old liras of bread and 5 of ‘torta’). It is popular as a takeaway snack but in some places can also be eaten ‘in’.
To finish off your meal you can try the well-known and very popular Livornese ‘Ponce’, a potent hot drink made from coffee and rum in a secret formula. The most famous bar in Livorno for Ponce is Civili in Via del Vigna, but it is available everywhere.

Just some of the Ice Cream flavours on offer at Gelateria Fior di Latte in Via RomaIf there's one thing you have to do when you're in Livorno, it's have an ice cream! At least one. I don't think Italian ice cream can be bettered, and there are many ice cream shops, or gelaterias, where you can put my theory to the test.

If you would like to taste some of Tuscany's fine wines, there are several places in Livorno that can arrange wine-tasting sessions by prior arrangement. Some are wine sellers, some wine bars. They are:

Cantina Nardi 
Choco and Wine

Enoteca Faraoni

La Botte e il Tappo

Bottles of Tuscan WineAn Introduction to Tuscan Wine

Italian wines are some of the most famous in the world,  and Tuscan wines include some of the best wines in Italy. The aim of this article is to provide a simple guide to Tuscan wines. Although I like wine, I am not an expert, so I do not intend here to give detailed descriptions of individual wines.  Instead I would like to provide readers with an outline of the different wines available in Tuscany, the grape varieties indigenous to Tuscany, and the ‘wine roads’ (Strade del Vino) around the many Tuscan vineyards.

Not just Chianti

Most of the wine produced in Tuscany is red wine, made above all from the Sangiovese grape. The best-known name is undoubtedly Chianti, but this is only one of the many types of wine produced in the region of Tuscany and there are actually 8 different areas of Chianti itself. But Tuscan wine is not about Chianti alone. Far from it. Below you can consult a list of the most popular and well-known Tuscan wines, including the few whites that the region produces using mainly the Trebbiano grape (except for Vernaccia). Vin Santo ('holy wine'), made from dried grapes, is also widely produced. It can be dry or sweet and is drunk as a dessert wine with special almond biscuits (cantuccini).