In a drawer, or perhaps in a forgotten municipal archive, lies a floor plan yellowed by time. It bears the wording «Location Hypothesis» and a scale of 1:25,000.
It is not just any map: it is the DNA of the economic development of an entire area of Tuscany.
Probably drawn between the late 1970s and early 1980s, that geographic chart traced the fate of the district between Pisa and Livorno with a precision that today, forty years later, leaves one breathless.
The map covers the area from Livorno, visible in the bottom left corner, towards Florence. It is a territory marked by a dense network of canals, railways and roads crossing the Pisa-Livorno plain. With different colors, the planners had already outlined the zones destined to change the face of this land: pink for the interport area, brown for industrial zones, yellow for artisan areas, light blue for services, and dark green for the pine forests to be preserved.
The infrastructures were already all there, on paper: the motorways and expressways indicated with thick double lines, the railway network with black dashed lines, the rivers and canals in blue. And above all, in the pink area, a symbol that looks like scissors: the railway freight yard designed to sort containers from the Port of Livorno towards the rest of Italy.
Comparing that map with the current situation means witnessing an urban transformation faithful to a project born decades ago. The location was respected to the letter: the pink area of back then is today the Tuscan Interport «Amerigo Vespucci» in Guasticce, in the municipality of Collesalvetti, with its large logistics warehouses visible to those traveling along the FI-PI-LI or the A12 Motorway.
But it is not just a matter of location. Railway development has followed and exceeded expectations. If on the historical map the «comb» tracks were only a hypothesis, today that yard is operational and is the heart of Livorno’s hinterland port. And there is more: the Railway Overpass is being completed, a work that will allow freight trains to directly connect the Port of Livorno to the Interport, bypassing the Tyrrhenian passenger line. A barrier that was hinted at on the map of the past, but which technology is now about to eliminate.
The road junctions drawn as «route hypotheses» have become concrete realities. The intersection to the left of the pink area is today the junction between the SGC FI-PI-LI and the A12 Motorway (Genoa-Rosignano), one of the busiest points in Tuscany. The industrial and artisan zones planned east of the central core have been built, today hosting large multinationals in the logistics and pharmaceutical sectors. And then there is the water. The blue line at the top, the Arno Scolmatore (Arno flood relief canal), indicated as the natural northern boundary, could soon become much more. There are advanced projects
— partly already funded — to make it navigable for small barges.
The objective is ambitious: to connect the Interport directly to the sea also by water, transforming that simple blue line into a river motorway. Almost everything that was hypothesized in that drawing has been built.
The green areas were respected: approximately 70 hectares of greenery were maintained as environmental rebalancing areas, honoring the dark green of the original legend.
In an era when urban planning projects often remain stuck on paper, the case of the Interporto Pisa-Livorno represents a rare and precious exception. That plan was not an academic exercise: it was a compass. And it guided the economic development of the entire area for over forty years, from the birth of the Interporto Toscano in 1987 to the present day.
Perhaps the most important message is this: when territorial planning is done with vision, expertise, and foresight, time does not disprove it. The confirmation is there, in the roads we travel, in the trains that transport goods, in the warehouses that employ thousands of people. All drawn, with pastel colors and precise lines, on a map that someone, decades ago, had the courage to imagine.
