We will have to wait until next June to find out whether the urban planning interventions within the port of Livorno will have to comply with the new landscape constraints imposed last summer or not, and with the related binding opinion of the Superintendency.
This was decided by the TAR of Florence, which set the hearing on the merits and took note of the waiver of the request for suspension by the Port System Authority of Livorno, which challenged the acts by which the Municipality of Livorno, incorporating the indications of the Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the provinces of Pisa and Livorno, “approved the municipal operational plan, conforming it to the regional landscape plan in force, extending (for the first time), as per the minutes of 12.06.2025 of the landscape conference, the coastal strip landscape constraint also to the operational port and retro-port areas under the exclusive competence of the Port System Authority of the Northern Tyrrhenian Sea.”
In essence, the Superintendency, relying on a ruling by the Constitutional Court in 2023 which established the unconstitutionality of a rule that had tried to exempt port areas from landscape constraints, changed its approach months ago, objecting that the exclusion of these areas from the constraint made the Municipal Operational Plan non-compliant with regional planning, effectively ‘forcing’ the Municipality to make a change, from which the appeal arose that will be discussed in June, with repercussions that will affect the entire port sector.
It is worth noting that the president of the Adsp, Davide Gariglio, relied on Ugo Patroni Griffi, who has dealt closely with the subject not only as a jurist but also as president of the Port System Authority of the Southern Adriatic Sea, years ago at the center of a complex litigation with the Municipality of Brindisi focused precisely on the centrality of the Port Master Plan as a planning tool in the port.
Furthermore, Patroni Griffi dedicated a scientific article ad hoc to the “issue of landscape protection in ports: a still unresolved criticality” last summer, published in the journal “European Public Law” co-authored with Tito Vespasiani, the new secretary general of the Adsp of Genoa (where the issue has continued to be at the center of port news in recent years, from the new breakwater to the possible covering of the quaysides to the protection of historic buildings like the decommissioned Enel power plant).
A.M.
