New terms for the call for ideas for the cruise and container terminal outside the lagoon

Venice, 17 May 2024 – The North Adriatic Sea Port System Authority has made amendments to the Tender Regulations and the Annexes of the Call for Ideas aimed at collecting concept proposals and technical and economic feasibility plans for the construction and management of cruise and container berths outside the Lagoon’s sheltered waters. The deadline for submitting projects has been extended until 15 November. The operators that had already submitted a concept proposal are also required to resubmit projects by the new deadline.
The Authority’s actions follow the Council of State’s ruling (section V, no. 8181 of 5 September 2023) and the Council of State’s subsequent clarifications (section V, ruling no. 3138 of 5 April 2024).
The call was published on 29 June 2021, as envisaged by Decree Law no. 45 of 1 April 2021 converted into Law no. 75 of 17 April 2021: its aim was to reconcile cruise activities in the territory of Venice and its lagoon, and the need to safeguard its unique cultural, landscape and environmental heritage.
The new call states that proposals and projects must meet the following requirements: guarantee the safety of operations and navigation even in adverse weather and sea conditions, and ensure sustainability from an environmental, energy and landscape point of view; provide connections to land interchange nodes and TEN-T networks; guarantee the reception of transoceanic container services (gateway and transshipment port) and cruise services (home port). It also sets out that the port facility must be designed and built outside the Lagoon’s sheltered waters, as per Harbour Master’s Ordinance no. 41 of 15 June 2020 and no. 176 of 17 May 2006, facing the Veneto’s coastal arc and not beyond national territorial waters.
At the end of the new deadline, the submitted concept proposals will be assessed by a committee of five experts with proven experience in transport engineering, port facilities and in infrastructure, transport and transport economics in general. The commission will shortlist the first three concept proposals by 31 December 2024. The second stage requires the submission of feasibility projects by 30 September 2025. The selection committee will then have until 30 January 2026 to decide and will announce the non-final ranking during an on-line meeting on 16 February 2026. The final ranking list announcing the winner will be published, once general and professional requirements have been ascertained, by 31 March 2026.
The President of the Port Authority Fulvio Lino Di Blasio declared: “Venice has confirmed its role as an international workshop for the development of sustainable practices, especially in the port environment. Our status as a regulated port and as a port of call located in a particularly fragile lagoon environment and near an urban centre of utmost historical and artistic value makes us very much unique in Italy: as a result, we are called upon to develop solutions for the management of commercial and passenger ship flows that anticipate all kinds of events, first and foremost climate-related ones. It is also for this reason that the Council of State’s ruling is important: it has shed light on the right way to go to manage the call for ideas for the construction of a cruise and container terminal outside the Lagoon’s sheltered waters. Over the next six months, the operators who had already submitted their projects will be asked to resubmit them and, at the same time, we will receive new concept proposals. The aim is to manage to identify the idea, from the environmental, economic and infrastructural points of view, by March 2026.”.