Campaign For A Living Venice

The priorities of the new president of the Venice Port Authority concern projects already in the works, such as dredging canals to allow cruise ships back to Marittima Station, which “I am absolutely convinced we will be able to accelerate”.

By Gianluca Anoè

Nov. 14, 2025

Four months into his term as commissioner and just days after his official appointment to lead the Venice Port Authority, Matteo Gasparato has outlined the course of his mandate. He did so on the sidelines of a visit to the Santa Marta headquarters by Deputy Minister of Infrastructure and Transport Edoardo Rixi, who met with the Venice Port Community.

Priorities for the Port

Gasparato’s priorities are clear: “We need to look at the projects that were evaluated by those who preceded me. In recent years, Parliament established that the Vittorio Emanuele Canal and the Malamocco Canal should be dredged, that another maritime station should be built, and a new island—it will be called Tresse—to carry all the sediment.” Concerning these projects, “I’m absolutely convinced we’ll be able to accelerate progress,” and on Tresse Island in particular, “we’re almost ready to take action, I hope, because it’s beyond our control. As soon as we have the measures in hand, we’ll quickly begin the entire bureaucratic process.”

These are strategic projects not only for operations, but also for competitiveness: “On the cruise ship front”, the new president noted, “Venice is the most important hub in the Adriatic, and if Venice doesn’t restart, the entire Adriatic will struggle, so I’m fully committed to stepping up the pace”. There are also other issues on the agenda, such as the revision of the port master plan and the waterfront, but “they are still secondary to the other projects.”

Offshore Port

Regarding the offshore port, for which the Port Authority itself recently announced the move to the second phase of the competition for ideas, Gasparato maintains a pragmatic approach: “It’s a project with a longer-term perspective,” he explained, “and I absolutely never said, as I’ve read, that I’m not interested. I’ll move forward with it like all the others, but it’s clear that it has a different timeline than other projects”. In the meantime, “we can’t just sit around and chat, because the canals need to be dredged, and I don’t intend to scare all the cruise ships away from Venice”.

MOSE

Also present at today’s meeting was Roberto Rossetto, president of the Lagoon Authority, “with whom I’ve had several meetings and who is sharing a path with us”. MOSE, Gasparato noted, “is being raised much more frequently, and this is due to a series of circumstances beyond my control or Rossetto’s control,” and for this reason, “it is necessary to find rules to allow those who work in the port to continue operating without major problems”.

Source: Venezia Today