Marina Genova (Genoa)

Location

Sestri Ponente, western end of the port of Genoa, Liguria, Italy, at 44 25.0 N 008 50.3 E, immediately north of the airport runway

Official name

Porto Turistico Camillo Luglio, named for the boatyard family that has worked this water since the 1960s

Operator

Marina Genova Aeroporto, with Giuseppe Pappalardo as chief executive and about 100 people employed

Built

proposed 1994, ministerially approved May 1998, main construction 2002 to 2007, three basins over about 210,000 square metres of water

Berths

500 quoted by the marina, of which 100 are superyacht positions for 30 m and up. Other sources say 600, over 400, or about 1,200 for the whole Sestri Ponente waterfront

Vessel range

8.5 m to 130 m LOA, maximum beam 18.5 m, maximum draught 15 m

Depths

2.7 m to 15 m across the basins per Sea-Seek, with 15 m alongside the fuel quay; the marina publishes no depth figure of its own

Fuel

150 m quay, five high-power pumps, duty paid and duty free, over 6 million litres supplied in 2024, up 43 per cent on 2023

VHF

the marina's own contacts page gives 73 for the night dockmaster and 74 as the marina channel. Three third-party directories list 71, so confirm before arrival

Refit on site

Cantieri Navali di Sestri, 420 tonne Ascom travel lift to 43 m, 400 tonne overhead crane, about 13,000 square metres. Mostes, 160 tonne travel lift to 30 m and an 85 tonne crane

Refit in the city

Amico and Co, about 65,000 square metres, 835 t and 320 t travel lifts, a 4,000 t ShipLift to 95 m opened October 2019, twelve covered slots, docks to 200 m, 24 refit berths to 110 m with 630 A shore power

Accreditation

RINA MaRINA Excellence with maximum score, plus the 24 Plus and 50 Gold ratings for vessels over 24 m and over 50 m. Institutional member of the SEA Index since 14 July 2025

Energy

7,000 square metre photovoltaic array of 800 panels live January 2025, about 500 MWh a year, two Aqua superPower rapid chargers to 320 kW, six EV points, five Seabins

Airport

Genoa Cristoforo Colombo, about five minutes by road, 2,916 m runway on an artificial peninsula, 1,335,095 passengers in 2024, no long-haul services

Trading

2024 turnover above EUR 15 million, up 20 per cent on 2023, occupancy 90 to 100 per cent in recent months, 254 superyacht arrivals, 6,855 superyacht stopover days

Berth tenure

broker listings show leases expiring 2052, while marina sales material has referred to concession until 2092 and to 20, 35 and 90 year terms

The airport at five minutes, and what that is actually worth

Genoa's Cristoforo Colombo airport stands on an artificial peninsula pushed out into the sea between 1954 and 1962, with a single runway, 10/28, of 2,916 metres. It sits 7.4 kilometres west of central Genoa in the Sestri Ponente district, and Marina Genova lies immediately north of it, inside the same stretch of harbour. Broker listings put the marina about 5 kilometres from the city centre and five minutes from the terminal, and both figures describe the same short drive round the head of the runway. For an owner running guest changeovers this is the single most valuable thing about the place: a party that lands at 11:00 is aboard before noon, which is not true of Antibes, Portofino or Porto Cervo.

The limit is what flies into Genoa. The airport handled 1,335,095 passengers in 2024 across 15,941 aircraft movements, which made it Italy's 21st busiest, and it runs no long-haul at all. Ryanair, ITA Airways, Aeroitalia and Wizz Air carry most of the traffic on European and domestic routes. Guests arriving from outside Europe route through Milan or Rome and continue by car, train or light aircraft, which turns a five-minute transfer into a three-hour one and is the detail most owners discover late. There is a railway station, Genova Sestri Ponente-Aeroporto, on the doorstep, and the marina runs a free shuttle for its guests to the airport and to the Porto Antico in the old city, a service the marina's own management confirmed publicly in August 2026 when answering a visitor's complaint about being cut off.

What the marina is, and who built it

The formal name on the concession documents is the Porto Turistico Camillo Luglio, after the family that had run a boat repair business on this stretch of water since the 1960s, wedged between the Fincantieri yards and the former Piaggio Aero site. The proposal dates from 1994, the ministerial approval from May 1998, and an inter-institutional agreement between the city, the port authority and the region in 2000 unlocked the land. Main construction ran from 2002 to 2007. The result is three large basins with about 210,000 square metres of water, 38,000 square metres of built area and a parking provision that different sources put between 700 and 2,500 spaces.

The marina's own material describes 500 berths for boats from 8.5 to 130 metres, of which 100 are for yachts of 30 metres and up. Trade listings break the large end down further into roughly 41 berths at 24 to 30 metres, 34 at 31 to 50 metres and 25 at 51 metres and above. Those also total 100, but they are not the same 100: the trade breakdown counts from 24 metres and the marina counts from 30, so the two cannot be laid over each other. Note that the counts do not settle: the operator says 500, a booking platform says 600, an Italian company profile says over 400, and cruising guides that describe the whole Sestri Ponente waterfront rather than this marina alone reach about 1,200. The number that matters to a large yacht is the 100 superyacht positions and the maximum figures behind them: 130 metres LOA, 18.5 metres of beam and 15 metres of draught, with the fuel quay dredged to the same 15 metres.

Your guests are aboard five minutes after landing, a 420 tonne travel lift is behind the pontoon, and there is not one published price for any of it.

The approach, and the working port you share

This is not a resort marina with a private entrance. Genoa is one of the largest commercial ports in the Mediterranean and the approach to Sestri Ponente crosses its western basins. A dredged deep-water channel for tankers runs in through the area, marked by numbered buoys, and cruising guides instruct pleasure craft to stay at least 50 metres south of them so as not to foul commercial traffic. The entrance itself is on the western side of the basin, identified from seaward by four large white buildings on the hill behind. One Ligurian port guide records that marina operations are suspended for up to ten minutes at a time while oil tankers manoeuvre nearby, which is a real thing to plan a departure slot around and a thing no brochure mentions.

Get the radio channel confirmed before you rely on it, because the sources contradict each other. The marina's own contacts page gives VHF 73 for the night call to the dockmaster and VHF 74 as the marina channel, while Superyachts.com, Yacht Digest and MarinaReservation all list VHF 71. Cruising visitors who have actually called report raising the marina immediately on channel 73 and being met by two staff in a tender who walked them onto the berth. Night arrival is the weak point: the inner basins are poorly lit for a first-timer and one long-standing cruising guide advises a yacht arriving at Genoa for the first time after dark to consider the Duca degli Abruzzi basin to the east instead. The marina gates close between 01:00 and 06:00 and the hospitality desk works 09:00 to 18:00, so an out-of-hours arrival is handled by the dockmaster on the mobile line rather than by the office.

Lifting out without leaving Sestri

The reason a lot of yachts choose this basin is not the pontoons, it is what is bolted to the quay behind them. Cantieri Navali di Sestri operates inside the same complex on about 13,000 square metres, which makes it one of the larger yards in Liguria, and it replaced its old 300 tonne travel lift with a 420 tonne Ascom machine that hauls and launches yachts to 43 metres. Alongside it sits a 400 tonne overhead crane, a 60 tonne mobile crane, 40 and 200 tonne bogies and an ABI trailer. The yard moves roughly 250 boats a year and runs its own basin of about 150 berths to 45 metres, with water and power on the pontoons.

For smaller work, Mostes operates in the marina with an 85 tonne crane and a 160 tonne travel lift for hulls to 30 metres, across two outdoor areas of about 4,500 square metres each, five hangars and two workshops. Between the two yards, an owner with anything from a 12 metre motorboat to a 43 metre yacht can be lifted, painted, antifouled and relaunched without a delivery passage. Above 43 metres the lift-out has to happen elsewhere in Genoa, which is the point of the next section. Fincantieri's historic Sestri Ponente shipbuilding yard is the immediate neighbour, which is why the surroundings look the way they do and also why the local labour pool exists at all.

The Genoa refit cluster, and the warning it is giving itself

Genoa is one of the two or three serious superyacht refit clusters in the world, and the heavy capacity sits at the eastern end of the port rather than at Sestri Ponente, roughly a 20 minute run along the harbour. Amico and Co occupies about 65,000 square metres near the city centre with two travel lifts of 835 and 320 tonnes, a 4,000 tonne ShipLift opened in October 2019 after a EUR 27 million investment that takes hulls to 95 metres up to ground level, twelve covered slots for yachts of 50 to 75 metres, an internal covered graving dock of 102 by 18 metres with 31 metres of air draught, and access to Ente Bacini docks of 170 and 200 metres. Its technical marina holds 24 refit berths to 110 metres with shore power to 630 amps. The yard runs more than 130 projects a year. T. Mariotti and San Giorgio del Porto, both in the Genoese GIN group, add large-vessel and megayacht refit alongside.

The cluster publishes its own numbers, and in 2026 they carried a warning. The Genova for Yachting association, using a study by The European House Ambrosetti, put the 2025 economic impact at EUR 663 million, up 5 per cent from EUR 630 million in 2024, with 3,240 workers, EUR 234 million of contribution to Ligurian GDP and 12,400 crew based in the city. But total yacht stay days fell from about 77,000 to about 71,000, a drop of roughly 8.5 per cent, and the 50 to 75 metre segment declined for the first time. Value per day of presence rose enough to mask it in the headline figure. Alberto Amico said publicly that Genoa has stood still too long and risks losing ground as a global reference hub, and the association called for the kind of integrated public and private governance that Barcelona and the French Riviera already have. An owner choosing a winter base should read that as a live competitive question rather than a settled one.

Fuel, power and the spend on the quay

The fuel station is the marina's strongest single asset and it says so, describing the largest fuelling quay in the Mediterranean: 150 metres of berth, five high-power pumps, 15 metres of water alongside and bunkering either duty paid or duty free for commercially registered yachts. Waste water pump-out is taken at the same quay, and bunkering can also be delivered to your own berth. The volume backs the claim up. Marina Genova supplied more than 6 million litres of fuel in 2024, up 43 per cent on 2023. No price per litre is published; you take a quote on the day like everywhere else in Italy.

The rest of the utility picture is metered per berth and, unusually for a marina of this size, not tabulated anywhere public. A 35 metre berth advertised for sale specifies 64 amp shore power, water and two car parking spaces, which is the only concrete amperage figure Yotters could find attached to a named berth. Separately, and not to be confused with berth power, the marina installed two Aqua superPower rapid charging points for electric boats rated to 320 kW and six electric vehicle charging points in the car park. A 7,000 square metre photovoltaic array of 800 panels came on line in January 2025 generating about 500 MWh a year, and five Seabins collect microplastics in the basins. The marina joined the SEA Index, the superyacht CO2 benchmarking scheme, as an institutional member on 14 July 2025.

What a berth costs, and what is never published

Marina Genova publishes no rate card. Every page on the site that touches money ends in a request-a-quote button, and no daily, monthly or annual tariff for any length band is published online or in any document you can download. That is not the same as saying no tariff exists. The marina has its own port regulation, the Regolamento di esercizio ed uso del Porto Turistico Camillo Luglio, and Article 9 of it says that for boats in transit the tariffs are set in advance by the company, on an hourly or a daily basis, and are displayed at the company offices, to be paid in advance by the crew. The transit price is therefore fixed and posted. It is just posted where only somebody already standing in Sestri Ponente can read it. The only hard, dated numbers in the market are on the resale side, where berths trade as long leases and brokers list them openly. In 2026 Cambiaso Risso offered berth K09, 22 by 6.2 metres, at EUR 350,000 plus VAT with one parking space and a storage unit, and berth J18, 45 by 11 metres, at EUR 1,350,000 VAT paid with four parking spaces, both on leases running to 2052. Bluewater listed a 35 by 9 metre berth at EUR 1,600,000 on a lease to the end of 2052. SuperYachts Monaco listed berth K13 at 65 metres for EUR 2,500,000 VAT paid.

The J18 listing carries the figure an owner most needs and the others omit: annual service charges of approximately EUR 20,000 plus VAT on a 45 metre berth, plus 4 per cent registration tax, a EUR 500 contract registration fee and notary costs at purchase. Note the tenure disagreement. Broker listings consistently show leases expiring in 2052, while a berth sales news item describes berths available with concession until 2092, and the marina's own sales pages have referred to 20, 35 and 90 year terms. Those are not the same asset and the difference is worth decades of value, so read the actual deed rather than the advertisement. For a passing yacht, the only public transit indication is the cruising platform Navily, which estimates about EUR 98 a night for the average size of boat in its community, a figure that tells a 40 metre owner nothing at all.

The Boat Show week, and the rest of the year

The Genoa International Boat Show is the fixed point in this marina's calendar even though it does not happen here. The 66th edition runs 1 to 6 October 2026 at the Waterfront di Levante on the far side of the city, over 200,000 square metres of land and water with 85 per cent of the space outdoors, more than 1,000 exhibitors, over 2,500 boats on display and attendance in the order of 350,000. The 2026 edition expands the area given to yachts over 24 metres and adds the new Palasport, with TechTrade Days on 1 and 2 October. What that means at Sestri Ponente is a fortnight either side of the show in which berths, hotel rooms, cars and yard slots across the whole city are spoken for.

Away from the show, the marina runs its own events, notably Yacht and Garden in May, a garden and culture show on the quays with free entry, and a classic boat gathering. The wider performance numbers show what the calendar actually delivers: Marina Genova closed 2024 with consolidated turnover above EUR 15 million, up 20 per cent on 2023 and 32 per cent on 2022, berth occupancy running between 90 and 100 per cent in recent months against 86 per cent in 2022, 254 superyacht arrivals and 6,855 superyacht stopover days, with about 100 people employed. Chief executive Giuseppe Pappalardo, in charge for twenty years, framed the strategy as investing ahead of the needs of yachts up to 130 metres. Effectively full occupancy is good news for the operator and bad news for a yacht that wants a berth at short notice in September.

The honest weaknesses

Three complaints recur and all of them are true. The surroundings are industrial: Fincantieri's shipyard on one side, the airport on the other, container and tanker traffic across the water, and none of the visual pleasure of a Ligurian fishing harbour. Aircraft noise is real and visitors say so plainly. And the marina is cut off from the city in a way the five-minute airport line disguises. Cruising visitors in 2026 described it as isolated, with a couple of restaurants and chandlers and little else, awkward to leave without a car and expensive to get into town and back. The marina's own management answered that publicly, pointing to four restaurants, two bars and two ship chandlers on site and the free shuttle to the airport and Porto Antico, which is a fair reply rather than a rebuttal.

The one that matters operationally is swell. Liguria's dangerous wind is the libeccio from the southwest, which is the cross-swell wind for this stretch of coast, and a strong libeccio closes the port to pleasure traffic outright. Even in settled weather a catamaran crew reported in June 2026 that there is a constant surge in the basin with no wind at all, enough to snatch the boat forward on her lines, and advised rigging springs. That is consistent with a basin that opens onto a large commercial harbour rather than a closed pool. Other reported gaps are smaller but worth budgeting for: no shore power adaptors held on the quay, sanitary blocks that visitors rate as adequate rather than good, and paperwork on arrival that several one-night visitors found heavy for a single stay. Genoa itself is superb, but you have to go to it.

Для кого: An owner who values a five-minute airport transfer and heavy lifting capacity on the same quay more than he values a pretty harbour and a walkable old town.