The small crowd gathering on the beach at Viareggio on a July
morning in 1822 could not have known that the two bodies washed ashore following
the previous night’s storm would attract so much international attention. The
poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Edward Williams were living at Lerici,
near Pisa, and decided to sail to Livorno on Shelley’s yacht, Ariel. The vessel foundered during the sudden storm, and all aboard were
drowned. Shelley and Williams were buried in the sand right on the beach,
although Shelley was later exhumed and cremated (with fellow poet Lord Byron
present, and much to the consternation and disapproval of the Roman Catholic population), and his ashes now rest in the Protestant
Cemetery in Rome.
 Margherita restaurant, said to be a favorite of
Giacomo Puccini. Photograph by Giuliano Sargentini. (Click image to enlarge)
Prior to this first "yachting" event, Viareggio was a minor but
nonetheless strategic small port situated astride the Burlamacca Canal, which
dates back to the twelfth century. The town and the area just inland were
repeatedly contested in the ongoing rivalry and struggle for supremacy between
the city-states of Lucca and Pisa. The latter benefited from its control of the
fine natural port at Livorno. The citizens of Lucca, located north of Pisa and
several miles inland to the east-southeast of Viareggio, not surprisingly wished
to pursue their maritime commerce free of the unwelcome interference of Pisa’s
customs collectors, and so they concentrated on expanding the Burlamacca Canal
into a proper port.The canal thus evolved continuously, both as a way of draining
the vast marshes and reclaiming the land to the east toward the Apennines, and
as a port to accommodate the growing fishing and trading fleets. To this day you
can see the sixteenth-century iron mooring rings set into the brick bulkhead in
the inner basin.
 The yacht basin. (Click image to enlarge)
Merchandise landed there would be transported overland to
Lucca, and then to Florence, now a short one-hour drive away at Italian highway
speeds, but in those days an arduous, three-day journey over mountain passes.
Early photos, and even earlier drawings, show the Burlamacca Canal emptying
directly into the Tyrrhenian Sea, its mouth barely protected by breakwaters.
Spurred by the growth of pleasure boating in the post–World War II era, the city
eventually built an artificial harbor, which in turn expanded into an outer
harbor and eventually grew into the present-day series of man-made boat
basins. By 1809, Viareggio had become a bustling small town of
approximately 2,900 inhabitants. Napoleon I’s sister, Pauline Bonaparte, had
become its most prominent resident. Sharing on a somewhat smaller scale her brother’s sense of grandiosity, she caused neighborhoods to be destroyed in
order to create vast boulevards to ease her access to the beaches that, even
then, were considered some of Viareggio’s main attractions. To her credit, she
also was responsible for the creation of the Pineta (pine grove) that has
preserved much of the area’s original flavor. An event of perhaps greater
interest to those in the yachting community is that the town archives record the
building and launching of a tartana, a small
sailing cargo vessel, in 1809.
By the 1820s, Giovanni Battista Codecasa, a name that is still an important
part of Viareggio’s panoply of esteemed boatbuilders, had established himself as a maestro d’ascia (master shipwright) and was working on the
local schooners, brigantines and three-masted barkentines (barcobestia in the local parlance). The first Codecasa
yard was founded in 1902 by Giovanni’s great-grandson, Tistino, who represented
the third generation of Codecasa shipwrights. The size limitations imposed by
the yard’s location in the inner basins eventually led to the construction of a
new yard on the outer harbor, allowing the company to stay abreast of the trend
toward ever-larger motor yachts. The Codecasa family is still firmly in control
of its yachtbuilding enterprise and an integral part of the Viareggio
economy.
Top photo: A sixteenth century mooring ring in the Darsena. Bottom photo: Modern
watercraft in the canal. Photographs by Giuliano Sargentini.
(Click images to enlarge)
In 1827, the government of Lucca granted a permit for the
construction of the first permanent bathing pavilion. Boatbuilding and bathing establishments became the town’s principal industries and continued in that role
to the present, nearly two centuries later. While the state-of-the-art shipyards
are now impressive in size and modernity, the lovely art nouveau bathing
pavilions and attendant hotels, most dating from the late-nineteenth century,
are what give Viareggio its distinctive architectural presence.
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