From the 2027/2028 school year, the Erzelli Science and Technology Park will host a high school class. Twenty-five students from the Istituto Gaslini Meucci will attend lessons on the twelfth floor of Building B, in 350 m² made available by Genova High Tech. The agreement, announced on 3 November, was signed by the company, the school and Alpim Fondazione per i Minori ETS, which is promoting the project.
It will be the first class of the Experimental Technology High School, which its promoters describe as the first high school of its kind in Italy.
The first two years at Erzelli
The park will host the first two years of the pilot programme. The school’s permanent home will be the Area Facchini, in Rivarolo, in Valpolcevera, where the new building has yet to be designed: the City of Genoa still has to formalise the international design competition.
The start date, however, has already been set. The framework programme agreement signed on 11 September 2026 by the City of Genoa, the Metropolitan City, the Liguria Region, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, the Ministry of Education and Merit, Trenitalia, Alpim and the Genoa Order of Architects provides for the pilot programme to begin in 2027/2028 in any case. The school and Alpim therefore needed premises for the first phase, and Genova High Tech found them in the park.
What is still needed to get started
The project is awaiting formal approval from the Ministry of Education and Merit. The Istituto Gaslini Meucci submitted the proposal on 8 October, asking to run the pilot programme for all five years. For the first class to start in September 2027, enrolment will have to close by January.
A district of schools in Valpolcevera
In the Area Facchini, the high school will be part of the Innovation Education District, which will also include a lower secondary school, a primary school, a crèche and a pre-school. At Alpim’s proposal, the Genoese laboratory Fusion AI Labs built a simulation estimating that the high school will have around 700 students once fully operational, mostly from Valpolcevera but also from the rest of the metropolitan area.
Alpim is chaired by Carlo Castellano, who founded Genova High Tech in 2003 and launched the park project.
Dialogue with the hill
In the agreement, the parties state their intention to open a dialogue with the University of Genoa, the Italian Institute of Technology, the Fondazione Ansaldo, Liguria Digitale and the region’s technology companies. Around 2,000 people currently work on Erzelli Hill, in more than twenty companies and institutes, and the New Polytechnic School will be operational in 2030. For two years, a class of fourteen-year-olds will have lessons just a few floors away from them.
Also read: Forty Thousand Empty Containers and an Idea: The Story of Carlo Castellano →
