Paolo Piacenza, president of the Autorità di Sistema Portuale dei Mari Tirreno Meridionale e Ionio (Port System Authority of the Southern Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas), has warned that the port of Gioia Tauro is reaching saturation point, saying the two terminals at the port are now “almost overbooked” and that new areas are urgently needed to support traffic growth. He noted that the port handles more than 40% of the containers moved in Italy, a volume which, according to Piacenza, is now saturating the operational capacity of the existing yards. The comments were made during the Visioni Collettive festival in San Ferdinando in mid-July 2026 and highlight an issue that has been unresolved for years: the former Enel areas in the port hinterland, which are blocked by litigation with Corap, the regional consortium now in liquidation.
The former Enel areas, located in the port hinterland between the municipalities of Gioia Tauro, Rosarno and San Ferdinando, are at the centre of a legal dispute dating back at least to 2023, when the Court of Appeal assigned ownership of the land to Corap, while confirming its inclusion within the port’s state-owned maritime property. This legal overlap has so far made it difficult to grant the areas to port operators, freezing expansion projects designed to support traffic growth and make use of the tools offered by Zes Calabria (Calabria Special Economic Zone), which covers around 607 hectares in the Gioia Tauro plain and hosts 35 companies.
Resolving the former Enel-Corap issue involves several institutional stakeholders: Regione Calabria (Calabria Regional Government), which manages Corap and the Zes instruments, the Zes commissioner and the local authorities of the plain, grouped within the Suap associato (associated Single Desk for Productive Activities) to simplify administrative procedures for the port hinterland industrial area. Until the dispute is settled, the areas remain unavailable for the port’s operational use, while the existing yards continue to absorb traffic that already reached an all-time high in 2025. The companies involved are Medcenter Container Terminal, controlled by the MSC group, and Automar, part of the Grimaldi group, which manages ro-ro and automotive traffic. Both operators are understood to have expressed interest in expanding into the port hinterland areas, which are currently unavailable precisely because of the litigation with Corap.
Antonio Illariuzzi
