La Spezia – Despite the geopolitical uncertainty that still overall influences the global maritime transport scenario, in the first nine months of the year the commercial traffic of the ports of the Eastern Ligurian Sea has recorded a counter-trend with a handling of 13.2 million tonnes of goods, an increase of 5.1% compared to the same period in 2025.
Containers handled overall in the two ports also grew with an increase of 2.5%, for 1,003,449 TEU, with a trend of over 1.3 million TEU expected by the end of the year.
The president of the AdSP, Bruno Pisano, commented: “The nine-month data is very satisfactory and demonstrates the resilience of the ports of La Spezia and Marina di Carrara, despite the objective difficulties posed by the current geopolitical and socio-economic scenarios. We have improved on the 2024 volumes where growth had already proven to be very interesting. In particular, the consistently excellent percentage of rail transport, which confirms us as the most advanced System in the Italian landscape, on par with some Northern European ports, confirms the AdSP’s commitment to the development of intermodality.”
The port of La Spezia handled a total of 9,555,709 tonnes in the 9 months (4.5%), with a strong recovery in liquid bulk imports which recorded a total of 1,176,115 tonnes (61.6%), of which 1,059,600 tons of LNG (57.6%) and 116,515 of other refined products (110%).
Solid bulk amounts to 16,298 tonnes (35.8%). General cargo is stationary overall with 8,363,293 tons of which 8,353,791 are containerized (0.5%) and 9,502 tonnes of other non-containerized miscellaneous goods.
Regarding containers, the port of La Spezia recorded an increase of 2.3% with 923,471 TEU handled, of which 850,053 TEU were gateway traffic (2.1%) and 73,418 TEU were transshipment (5.1%).
The intermodal data for the rail share remains very high, which, with 5,628 trains operated (4.3%) and 2,411,680 tonnes of goods transported (6.1%), reached a share of 36% net of transshipment with the terminal operator LSCT.
Cruise traffic data in the Gulf of La Spezia is increasing in 2025, continuing its positive trend and consolidating in the first nine months with the transit of over 630,000 cruise passengers (10.2%).
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Regarding the port of Marina di Carrara, from January to September, 3,618,985 tonnes of goods were handled, an increase of 6.9% compared to the same period last year, due to the recovery of all sectors: solid bulk stands at 493,601 tonnes (4.5%) while general cargo totals a handling of 3,125,384 tonnes (7.2%), of which 1,040,883 are containerized (3.3%), 1,572,293 are ro-ro traffic (6.9%) and 512,208 tonnes are other miscellaneous goods (17.4%). The rolling stock handled amounted to 41,036 units (7.9%).
Container traffic in the port of Carrara stands at 79,978 total TEU with a growth of 4.9% in the period.
Rail traffic data is also increasing in 2025, which handled 248 trains (15.8%) and 3,095 wagons (19.5%), for a total of 154,704 tonnes of overall goods (22.2%), of which 102,151 were containerized alone (21%).
Cruise traffic, however, suffered a decline, recording the transit of 11,092 passengers in the first nine months (-59%).
