This hasn’t been Livorno’s best summer. In between sips of ponce (coffee plus more than a dash of rum), or perhaps an elaborate cacciucco (fish soup), the locals’ main topic of conversation has been whether the city would be left without a team this year — that is, without soccer. If this thought spread around the port and the Eni petrochemical refinery, it will also have occurred to livornesi between bites of 5 e 5 — a sandwich so-called because it used to be ordered as “five lire of bread and five of chickpea cake.”

Realizing that one of the city’s flagship dishes still has a name referring to the cost of living isn’t the only way to get a sense of this city on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Livorno sits in a region, Tuscany, that has never been won by center-right parties: until 2014, all the city’s mayors were (ex-)Communists, and even the ones since then have been figures of the center-left. This year, Mayor Luca Salvetti participated in events honoring the centenary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which was founded in Livorno in 1921. From its origins at the congress held at the city’s Teatro San Marco, attended by Antonio Gramsci, Amadeo Bordiga, Palmiro Togliatti, and others, the PCI became the biggest party to raise the hammer-and-sickle banner in Western Europe — ultimately reaching a peak of 34 percent support and 12 million votes.

But this summer, beyond worrying about their household budgets, livornesi’s main concern was Livorno — the football club.