The associations of shipping agents, freight forwarders and Customs analysts of La Spezia ask that the Ligurian city be the to accommodate the aircraft carrier cruiser Giuseppe Garibaldi close to disarmament, which would be converted into a museum ship having been the flagship of the Italian fleet for over thirty years. The secretary general of the associations, Salvatore Avena, recalled that "La Spezia is a city linked to the Navy and has contributed significantly to the to its history, with the Arsenal, with the Naval Base, with Fincantieri Muggiano and the other defense industries, home for decades to the military service and training, preparing and providing professionalism and skills that have been and are the structure of civil and military work. For his part - he added - the city has built and developed an undeniable cultural and tourist vocation linked to the sea and seafaring, a vocation that is also expressed by cultivating a tradition of events and of events throughout the gulf for which it is search for a symbol that interprets and unifies its many souls".

Referring to the candidacies to host the ship, Avena said highlighted how "unexpectedly no one has included, in the confrontation provoked by Genoa and contested by Taranto, the candidacy of La Spezia, still enthusiastic for having hosted, here on the Garibaldi, with a wide echo and enormous success, the performance of Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. Unexpectedly because La Spezia really has all the cards in rule to host the ship Garibaldi as a floating museum and formidable pole of attraction. Which would also be the right, well-deserved and worthy completion of a network structured together with the historic basins of the Arsenal and the Naval Technical Museum".