Specialty coffee in Viareggio

Viareggio's seafront promenade was once all wood, put up by boatbuilders who spent their working days building boats. They were the ones who came up with the local wooden liberty style, in which art nouveau mixes with Japanese motifs and baroque. On the night of 17 to 18 October 1917 the whole lot burned in a single fire; essentially one shop survived. The rebuilding was entrusted to a commission with Puccini and the painter Galileo Chini on it, and the new buildings went up in masonry - that was when Viareggio got its most famous facade, and the wall that cut it off from its own sea.