The Port of Genoa is Italy’s main seaport for the industrial north-west, spread along 22 kilometres of the Ligurian Sea coast in the city of Genoa. In 2024 it handled about 64.5 million tonnes of cargo, second in Italy only to Trieste, and it moves more than 2 million TEU of containers a year alongside oil, bulk cargo, ferries and cruise ships. A harbour has worked here since antiquity, and the core of the present Old Port took shape in the High Middle Ages under the Republic of Genoa. It matters because Genoa forms the southern corner of the Milan–Turin–Genoa industrial triangle, and its rail and motorway links make it a gateway to northern Italy and central Europe. How it works is shaped by one hard fact: the Apennines come almost straight down to the sea, so everything has to fit on a thin strip of reclaimed coast.
A 22-Kilometre Strip Between the Apennines and the Ligurian Sea
The port does not have one centre. It is a chain of basins, piers and terminals strung along the shore from east, the Levante, to west, the Ponente. In the east it begins at the Grazie basin, with shipyards and repair workshops beside the Foce trade-fair district and the Duca degli Abruzzi marina, home of the Yacht Club Italiano. Moving west come the Old Port, the ferry and cruise piers, the freight terminals of Sampierdarena near the lighthouse, the steel and shipbuilding frontage of Cornigliano and Sestri Ponente, the oil terminal at Multedo near Pegli, and finally the container terminal at Pra’, with Voltri just beyond it.
All of this occupies about 700 hectares of land and 500 hectares of water. The figures below show how the system is measured along its length rather than its area, which is the key to understanding it. Ships reach the berths through 47 kilometres of maritime channels inside the breakwaters, and they tie up along 30 kilometres of operational quays.
Because there is almost no flat land behind the shore, most of that quay space was made by filling the sea. The pattern repeats across the city. Genoa’s Cristoforo Colombo Airport, begun in 1954 and opened in 1962, was built on an artificial peninsula 7.4 kilometres west of the centre, out in the sea rather than on the crowded shore. The Lanterna lighthouse itself once stood on a peninsula that has since been swallowed by landfill.
The hills also shape how cargo leaves. Containers move inland by rail and by motorways that climb through the Apennine valleys, and those land links, rather than the quays, are where the port is most easily squeezed. The whole system is administered by the Western Ligurian Sea Port Authority.
Pra’ Container Terminal and the Multedo Oil Berths
Containers are concentrated at the western end, in the district of Pra’. Here a broad platform of reclaimed land carries stacks of boxes, ship-to-shore cranes and rail sidings. The terminal lies close to the motorway exit at Pra’, where the A10 coastal motorway towards France meets the A26, which crosses the Apennines towards Piedmont. Along the old Pra’ beach, a buffer strip between the terminal and the houses, the Fascia di Rispetto di Pra’, now holds a 1,000-berth marina.
The port has handled unusual cargo too. In July 2014 the wreck of the Costa Concordia, the cruise ship that struck a rock off Isola del Giglio on 13 January 2012 with the loss of 32 lives, was refloated on salvage sponsons and towed to Genoa for scrapping, a four-day journey at 2 knots with a 14-ship escort that ended on 27 July. She had been built in the city, at the Sestri Ponente yard, and the dismantling was completed on 7 July 2017.
East of Pra’, the Multedo oil terminal near Pegli receives tankers, several kilometres west of the passenger quays. Between Cornigliano and Sestri Ponente, several piers serve Fincantieri’s shipyards, where cruise ships are built. Further east again, the Sampierdarena basins beside the Lanterna hold the port’s central freight terminals, in a district that became one of Italy’s great industrial centres after the railway arrived in 1854.
Ponte dei Mille and the Ferry Quays to Sardinia, Sicily and Corsica
The passenger port sits right beside the historic centre. Its quays cover about 250,000 square metres, with 5 fitted berths for cruise ships and 13 for ferries. The designed annual capacity is 4 million ferry passengers, 1.5 million cars and 250,000 trucks. The main destinations are Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Barcelona and the Canary Islands, and in 2007 the passenger terminals handled 3.2 million passengers.
The main cruise terminal is the historic maritime station at Ponte dei Mille. It has been refitted with facilities modelled on modern airports, so that ships carrying thousands of passengers can embark and disembark quickly. MSC Cruises uses Genoa as one of its home ports, while the Genoese company Costa Cruises moved its home port along the coast to Savona. A third cruise terminal has been under construction at Ponte Parodi, a pier that once handled grain.
Ro-ro ferries make the port work differently from a pure container hub. Trucks and cars drive on and off, so the ferry piers need space for vehicles to queue and fast connections to the motorway, rail and airport networks. The Old Port area is framed by an elevated road, the Strada Sopraelevata, that runs for about six kilometres along the waterfront.
La Lanterna, the Molo Vecchio and the Medieval Engineering of the Old Port
The oldest part of the system is still in use. Around 1128 a first lighthouse was built on the San Benigno promontory at the western side of the natural harbour. The present tower, the Lanterna, was rebuilt in 1543. It is 76 metres of masonry in two square sections, the tallest lighthouse in Italy and in the Mediterranean, and it was the tallest in the world until 1902. Measured together with the rock it stands on, it rises 112 metres. It is still the main light serving the port.
The first breakwater came around 1250, when the rocky spur on the eastern side of the bay was extended with landfill. From the sixteenth century it was called the Molo Vecchio, the Old Mole, to distinguish it from the Molo Nuovo built on the opposite side near the lighthouse. The sheltered water behind it, the Mandraccio, became the main anchorage. By the mid-sixteenth century the Molo Vecchio was almost 500 metres long, and the architect Galeazzo Alessi completed the development of the old port.
Six wooden landing jetties stood near the Molo Vecchio, named after the goods handled there or families such as the Spinola and Grimaldi, and they were replaced by stone piers in the fifteenth century. Overlooking them was the Palazzo San Giorgio, built between 1257 and 1260 for the capitano del popolo Guglielmo Boccanegra. It later housed the Bank of Saint George, founded in 1407, and since 1903 it has been the seat of the port authority, so the office that runs the port still works from a building that stood on the medieval waterfront.
The Old Port has since been given a new role. For the 1992 exhibition marking 500 years since Columbus’s voyage, the Genoese architect Renzo Piano redesigned it as the Porto Antico, with the Aquarium of Genoa, the Bigo panoramic lift and the glass Biosphere. Cargo is now handled further west, and the old basins hold marinas, among them the Porto Antico marina with 280 berths and the Molo Vecchio marina with 160.
What the Port Means for Liguria and Northern Italy After the Morandi Collapse
The port is a major economic driver for Liguria. Terminal operations alone were estimated to generate €495 million of economic impact in 2025 and almost 3,500 direct jobs, before counting shipping agents, forwarders, hauliers and the shipyards. Its labour history is long: the port workers known as camalli, heirs to the old caravana gangs that loaded steamships at the grain silos, fought the port authority through the late 1980s as it pushed through the modernisation it saw as necessary to compete with the dominant ports of northern Europe.
Its weak point is the land connection, and that was exposed on 14 August 2018. A 210-metre section of the Ponte Morandi, the A10 viaduct over the Polcevera valley between Sampierdarena and Cornigliano, collapsed during a rainstorm and killed 43 people. The viaduct carried the A10 motorway straight across the port’s western districts. The remains were demolished in June 2019, and the replacement, the Genoa-Saint George Bridge designed by Renzo Piano, opened a year later.
The collapse pushed several projects up the agenda, some with the prospect of European Union funding: an intermodal freight hub in the Province of Alessandria to take containers inland by rail, a new customs gate on the right bank of the Polcevera, and round-the-clock terminal operation. Together they are meant to take about 4,000 heavy vehicles off the city’s roads at peak hours. For a port squeezed between mountains and sea, moving cargo inland quickly matters as much as the depth of its berths.
Genoa sits at the centre of the Ligurian coast, which runs south-east to the villages of Cinque Terre, and our guide to Italy’s geography shows how the Apennines and the Po Valley shape its hinterland. For the rival port further west along the French coast, see our piece on the Port of Marseille.