- silence

- Between the sea and the mountains, in the middle of a deep gulf also known under the name of the Gulf of the Poets,

- La Spezia, that used to be a strategic town for its arsenal and its trade harbor, started a few years ago a process of industrial reconversion

- for the development of all the activities linked to worksites, water sports and tourism.

- In 2005, a coalition of contractors bet on La Spezia as a port of call for cruiser liners.

- A watercraft pool to transport the passengers of those huge boats to the ground,

- a floating platform and, to wait for the cruise passengers at the disembarkation, buses but also a small train with which we can comfortably visit the town.

- La Spezia is a convincing harbor from this point of view, first of all from its geographic position.

- La Spezia can attract for amateur trips for its different places of prestige

- and interest as much as for architectonic gourmet that go from Ligurie to Emilia-Romagna to Tuscany.

- But the difficulties with the facilities start to show.

- In an Italy and a Mediterranean region where there are more and more harbors and thus a fierce competition,

- La Spezia cannot allow to do tenderaggio (passengers transport from the ship to the ground and vice versa using boats),

- so it is necessary to quickly make a quay, a facility able to host the first generation ships, up to 380 meter-long.

- A quay is thus needed to make a quality jump that will allow this town to monopolize a real share of the cruise market.

- An aid could rightly come to the arsenal. A town within the town. We take you there to know it.

- So, as in 1860 with the building of the arsenal the town changed aspect, underwent a fast economic growth, it became an industrial center,

- now the arsenal may contribute to the transformation of LA Spezia from a touristic point of view.

- Cruise passengers could disembark on those quays that saw the launching of great ships, as the Art Genius exhibition recalls in the arsenal.

- La Spezia Naval Museum tells us the narrow fusion between men and the sea and seamen’s achievements in the Navy.

- Ranging from figureheads to assault contraptions that were born in this region during World War I.

- This one is the “mignatta”, the twin of the assault contraption that was used during Pula undertaking in 1918.

- Here is the slow torpedo, called “the pig”, the one used by de la Penne to make tests for the assault of Alexandria.

- But La Spezia is also of art, culture.

- We came to one of its troubadours, working in a his studio, that Francesco Vaccarone defines as the “soul of the place”,

- as he finds rest here, inspiration, that he is happy.

- Those are 1957 paintings, studies I did in the morning of the brothel of La Suprema, where there is now a restaurant.

- I used to attend a classic high school and, as there was neither an artistic high school in La Spezia, nor any model,

- our professor, Giuseppe Ugo Casedici, took us to meet the nudes to draw them.

- And we went to visit today’s La Suprema, entirely restructured, that hosts a bar where tonight jazz lovers had an appointment.

- A long tradition links jazz to La Spezia, as the President of the Friends of Jazz Association tells us.

- Jazz arrived with the ships, the sailors, in America disks where exported,

- people listened to swing and 50 year later we are still here and listen to this music.