Le Piagge

This guide to Le Piagge in Pisa opens in 1851, when road contractor Angelo Pera bought a stretch of Arno riverside not for the public but to raise his own property's value, and follows what he built to do it. It traces his ceramics business after a rival's factory collapsed, and the bathing huts entrepreneurs later built into the shallows here in the 1920s. Listen for how each generation along this embankment has bet that people will pay to be beside the water.