For decades the port of La Spezia has built its efficiency and credibility on the capabilities of an integrated logistics chain, unique in its kind, certainly in Italy, the result of operational coordination between the port terminals and the Santo Stefano Magra port.
Entrepreneurial groups from La Spezia have invested almost 50 million in the inland port in the last five years, creating a reality based on functional coordination, in many respects unrepeatable, which for years now has been the subject of understandable attention from other maritime ports and other logistical entities still looking for winning formulas. And a mega Simplified Logistics Zone project is based on the rear port, which is now mature and ready to produce wealth and employment.
This consideration would be sufficient to express a “no” to the pursuit of other schemes based on corridors that would move goods and containers, but also employment and efficient productivity, to distant freight villages and logistics areas. And the port community of La Spezia does so with strength and decision, declaring: “Hands off the Santo Stefano Magra retroport”.
“We read – say the most representative operators of the port community – of new agreements with distant interports, agreements which should relaunch, we don’t know how, the La Spezia industry while in essence they aim to empty the port of functions and operations. We are the only ones to continue to strongly propose the true natural dry port of the port of La Spezia, that of Santo Stefano. Instead, the time has come – the operators continue – to implement those decisive actions, awaited for years, aimed at fully enhancing the role of Santo Stefano Magra as the natural lung of the port, but also as a true citadel of logistics and a place where many operators from La Spezia have placed the center of their business”.
According to the La Spezia port community, today there is a contrast between customs corridors, which impoverish the economic fabric of the area and reduce jobs, and a rear port which is a place for the creation of added value, where innovation means creating wealth and employment for the area, in contrast with the idea of a port where goods and containers pass quickly without producing any added value, an idea which under the false myth of digitalisation is periodically proposed again without being aware of contributing to causing economic damage to the port and all its related activities.
“On the function of the port, on the synergy with the port and on the ZLS project – conclude the spokespersons of the port community – we will be attentive and proactive but also inflexible with those who risk creating irreparable damage to the economy of our port and our territory”. The simplified logistics zone is essentially an alternative to customs corridors which have the objective of transferring goods and therefore wealth elsewhere.
