On 26 October, during the Genoa Science Festival, the Polytechnic School of the University of Genoa presented the first figures for the campus it is building on Erzelli Hill. Il Secolo XIX reported them the following day. The New Polytechnic School will have 62 classrooms, six of them computer rooms, a library, three cafés with refreshment areas and more than 400 workspaces in the two towers. There will be 800 parking spaces, half of which will be open to the public.
The classrooms will vary in size: twelve between 120 and 180 m², and seven larger ones. In total, the campus covers 60,000 m², the same as the Albergo dei Poveri university campus.
Two construction sites and a date
The campus is divided into two lots. In Lot B, the laboratory lot, construction is already under way with the consortium formed by Percassi and Nbi. Lot A includes classrooms, departments and services: work will start in February 2027 with a consortium led by Strabag. The entire hub is due to be operational in 2030.
What will be done in the laboratories
The laboratories will be housed in interconnected buildings and organised into major areas: naval engineering and propulsion, materials and manufacturing, environment and infrastructure, energy and electrical systems, chemistry and processes, robotics, digital and health. A further area brings together integrated propulsion, functional materials and environmental monitoring.
Federico Silvestro, professor of Electrical Power Systems and the university’s lead for the project, described one of the facilities: the university currently has one wind tunnel, and in 2028 it will have a second. Silvestro linked the laboratories to collaboration with businesses and with the sectors on which Genoa and Liguria rely, starting with the blue economy.
In some of these fields, companies are already on the hill. At Erzelli, Generative Bionics develops humanoid robots, Esaote has its headquarters and ultrasound research laboratories, and IIT works in its Center for Human Technologies. With the campus, students and researchers of the New Polytechnic School will have their laboratories just a short walk from these companies.
The connection with the city
The Dean of the Polytechnic School, Patrizia Perego, described the campus as “a major driving force not only for Genoa and Liguria but for the whole country”, and set out the condition for it to become one: the hill must be connected to the rest of the city. Mayor Silvia Salis had recently made the same point. According to Perego, concrete answers are needed on connections with Sestri Ponente Aeroporto railway station.
Also present were the new Rector Antonio Uccelli, who will head the University of Genoa from 1 November, and Councillor Giacomo Montanari, who included in the Festival programme a strand dedicated to the city’s development prospects.
Genova High Tech has already taken a step on the connection with the station. In October, it commissioned the detailed design of the cable car between the future Aeroporto-Erzelli station and the park: a single section covered in under two minutes, with a capacity of around 4,000 people per hour in each direction. By the end of the year, the company will submit a public-private partnership proposal to the City to build it.
Also read: Cable Car to Erzelli, Partnership Proposal by Year-End →
