Mosques without Minarets, a Ghetto without Walls: Minority Topographies in Seventeenth-Century Livorno

While cities throughout post-Reformation Italy enforced Jewish ghettoes and expulsed religious minorities, in 1591 the Grand Duke of Tuscany designated the port of Livorno a safe haven for émigrés from, “any nation, Eastern Levantines and Westerners, Spanish, Portuguese, Greeks, Germans, and Italians, Jews, Turks, and Moors, Armenians, Persians, and others.” As a frontier society unfettered by an official ghetto or powerful local gentry, in Livorno minorities were empowered to own property and actively shape the city’s development. For these reasons, Livorno appeared to be an almost ideal exemplum of religious pluralism, where, as the French Huguenot François Maximilien Misson euphemistically observed in 1687, “merchants of every country and religion live in complete liberty.”

Constructed nearly ex novo, Livorno offered few of the artistic marvels that typically attracted visitors of the Grand Tour. Nonetheless, seventeenth century travel narratives and mercantile diaries frequently mention the port’s religious pluralism. While the Frenchman Maximilien Misson strongly endorsed visiting Livorno’s slave prisons to see the, “small mosques decorated with the 5 or 6 ostrich eggs that the slaves posses,” in 1691 the Englishman William Acton, “went out of curiosity and saw the Jews Synagogue in the time of their Devotions.” Using published narratives, and diplomatic reports, this paper examines the degree of access to, and interest in, Livorno’s minority topographies. While not all visitors perceived non-Catholic spaces with benign curiosity, their testimony suggests how Livorno helped foster a growing sense of Mediterranean cosmopolitanism.