Before the companies, laboratories and construction sites, there were 40,000 empty containers on the Erzelli hill. A storage depot above the airport, in one of the city’s most scenic locations.
Carlo Castellano saw something else there: the place where Genoa could build its technological future, just as France had done at Sophia Antipolis. In April 2003, he founded Genova High Tech S.p.A., bringing together 60 Genoese entrepreneurs and managers, and took the helm as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer to launch the project.
It was not the first time he had started from scratch. An associate professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Genoa, and later Director of Planning, Research and Information Systems at the Ansaldo Group, in the late 1970s he established the Ansaldo Historical Archive, now Fondazione Ansaldo, bringing together the most important records of the company from its origins in 1854. In early 1980, he launched a new division of the group, Ansaldo Elettronica Biomedicale, which later became Esaote. Within ten years, it had become an international leader in diagnostic imaging, and in 1994 it was privatised through one of Italy’s first management buyouts.
A common thread runs through all these ventures: giving lasting form to something that does not yet exist. An archive that becomes a foundation, a corporate division that becomes a global company, a container depot that becomes the blueprint for a technology district on a hill.
Today, that project has taken the shape its founder envisioned: 20 technology companies based at Erzelli, the Franklin supercomputer operational since 2020, the University of Genoa’s Polytechnic School under construction and a total investment of approximately €1.5bn in its development.
His commitment to education continues elsewhere. Since 2020, Castellano has chaired Alpim, now Alpim Fondazione per i Minori ETS, which has launched a pilot Technology High School project in the Facchini area of Valpolcevera, in a facility long abandoned by the Italian State Railways. Another disused site, another investment in the future.
