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Genoa – If Genoa moves around 50 million tons of goods every yearthe other two ports in Liguria, Savona-Vado and La Spezia, together make almost 29 million, contributing to making the region the first Italian port hub.
Savona, in continuity with nearby Vado Ligure, has always been one and since 2016 under the umbrella of the Western Ligurian Sea System Authority together with Genoa, it is in many ways still a port-emporium, among the most diversified in Italy. Fruit, coal, containers, cars, cement, steel, paper, mineral oils and refined products move on its docks. In the approximately 15 million tons it handles every year, there is a small sample of Italian consumption.
La Spezia, on the other hand, is a port of a completely different nature, which found its mercantile vocation in the seventies of the last century, establishing itself as a modern container port in response to the crisis that blocked the Genoese docks in those years. The port handles more or less the same volumes as Savona (13 million tonnes last year) but also has a very current business, that of gas. Precisely because of its prevalent container vocation, La Spezia integrates well with the port with which it has been administratively merged since 2016, i.e. Marina di Carrara, which hosts activities absent in the Ligurian port, such as freight ferries and special loads.
While the port of Genoa has an annual report that lists by tonnage all the over 700 ports with which it is connected, La Spezia has a partial statistic, while for Savona-Vado it was necessary to knock on the port’s main terminal operators (there are 16 in total) to try to trace , based on their availability to provide industrial information, the international trade of this port. The picture that emerges is fascinating: cellulose and paper arrive at the Campostano terminal, less and less paper for printing or writing, and always plenty of paper for hygiene or home use. The flows come from South America, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, the United States, Finland and Sweden. Steel coils arrive from the Far East, almost nothing from China due to the tariffs, but on the other hand still significant quotas from Taiwan, Vietnam as well as from the steel mills of Turkey, Algeria, France: material for steel mills, pipe mills, household appliances from Northern Italy.
Every 45 days Large ships arrive from Russia loaded with cylinders of hot briquetted iron, renamed briquettes in port language, the pre-reduced iron (which is not sanctioned) to be burned in the steelworks’ ovens. Perlite comes from Turkey and bentonite from Greece, precious in construction and in many other fields, such as gardening or the cosmetic and food industry, from Spain ferrous sulphate for agriculture and alumina hydrate, a powerful refractory material; from Tunisia the salt to be thrown away on the highways in winter, from Pakistan the talc with a thousand uses. However, there is little export: mainly transhipments of cellulose from larger to smaller ships, destined for Greece or Turkey.
At one time it also came from Colombia and Venezuela, today almost all of the coal leaves from Norfolk, United States, headed to the Alti Fondali terminal in Savona, which once went up by cableway to Bragno (after the collapse of 2018 the route is via truck, and this has negatively affected the volumes managed) to be processed and become coke, the main fuel for the fusion of minerals in the production of cast iron, rock wool, but also sugar and bicarbonate. The coal for the cement kilns arrives from the refineries in the Gulf of Mexico, while the coke from Bragno does not all go to Northern Italy (or Europe, because some train loads go to France and Germany): part of it goes back to dock and is embarked towards Turkey, South Africa, Brazil, but also Italy at the former Ilva in Taranto. It also happened that some loads of coke, once processed in Valbormida, returned to the USA.
In Vado Ligure the Reefer terminal it is the largest fruit and vegetable port in the Mediterranean: tropical products such as pineapples and bananas, arriving from Central and South America, or from West Africa, or out-of-season fruit, arrive at the quay both on board the traditional banana boats and inside the refrigerated containers.
Finally, it deserves special attention gas traffic in La Spezia, which has more than doubled in the last year and a half. This is the direct effect of the cut in supplies from Russia: overlooking the gulf of the Ligurian city is what for a long time was the only classifier in Italy, and which is now working at full capacity. Where does most of the LNG come from? From Algeria: one million tons. Spain and Egypt follow at a great distance.
In bulk trades, La Spezia is certainly the kingdom of containers. The port of the Far East of Liguria has its specialty in containers, and in this sense it has always been a laboratory: the first private terminal in Italy, forwarding and receiving quotas for goods via train among the highest, always at the center of the experiments that they concern customs simplification processes (such as pre-acceptance and the one-stop shop). Unlike bulk cargo, which is mostly imported, container traffic highlights the industrial role of Italy, which not only consumes finished products, but produces and exports them in large quantities.
Precisely for this import and export, in the Contship and Gulf terminals, there is a balance in incoming and outgoing traffic. From the point of view of relations, however, La Spezia reserves few surprises: the largest importing country is China (1.2 million tons of goods), the largest exporting country is the United States (1.6 million): on a small scale, it is the scheme on which Italian import-export is based. The second importing country is Singapore (495 thousand tons), a reference for many regional services that collect goods in the East to be relaunched on Europe, the third country is Spain (337 thousand tons) which seem to be generated by the transhipment activity of the ports Iberians on products from countries facing the Atlantic. The second outgoing market for La Spezia is La Spezia Great Britain (582 thousand tons), the third is China (543 thousand tons: a good sign, given that the data is expressed in tons and not containers, which very often return to the East empty). In total terms, the first three countries most connected to La Spezia are therefore the United States (1.8 million tonnes), China with 1.7 million tonnes, followed by Algeria, which adds up to an enormous amount of LNG outgoing and some containers incoming from the Ligurian port (total 1.2 million tons). It should be noted that the incoming traffic from other Italian ports, most presumably in transhipment from Gioia Tauro but not only, is also 1.2 million tonnes (800 thousand in imports).
Savona entered the container business in a big way starting from 2020, with the opening of the Vado Gateway of the Apm Terminals group (which also manages the Reefer). Structure, which according to the latest World Bank report is the most productive in Italy, is attracting traffic to the market, growing by double digits (+20.8% at the end of 2022 compared to 2021) of which 55% is on boarding and 45 % landing. The port is connected through four shipping lines with the USA, the Middle East, India and other ports in the Mediterranean Sea.
Always between Savona and Vado finally is the ferry business. From the first, essentially freight services depart towards France, Spain and Morocco with the Grimaldi lines, which also provides vehicle transport services from Savona, but in this case the Auto Terminal has not provided – like the four liquid bulk terminals – details regarding the connections with the various countries. To remember, even if the lines concern passenger transport, they also represent a bridge between the island and the continent, the Corsica Ferries connections from Vado Ligure.
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