The Regional Administrative Court for Tuscany has accepted the appeal brought by the Port System Authority of the Northern Tyrrhenian Sea against the Municipality of Livorno, the Ministry of Culture and the Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and landscape for the provinces of Pisa and Livorno annulling, for nullity by absolute lack of attribution, the acts by which the Municipality of Livorno had extended the landscape constraint of the coastal strip to the port and retro-port areas of the port of Livorno, sanctioning that the planning of those areas is the exclusive responsibility of to the port authority.

With the judgment, in view of their connection objective and subjective, the TAR also accepted the appeals presented by Porta Medicea Srl, owner of a port area concerned from the "Porta a Mare" implementation plan which censured both municipal incompetence and the contradictory nature with respect to previous favourable opinions of the Superintendency, and by Confindustria Toscana centro e costa together with port companies Neri Depositi Costieri, F.lli Neri, Sintermar, Compagnia Impresa Lavoratori Portuali, Lorenzini & C. and Intercontainers Livorno, who have invoked similar complaints to protect their activities in the areas concerned.

The story stems from a council resolution of 28 July 2025 with which the Municipality of Livorno had updated the framework of the variant to its structural plan and had at the same time, the new operational plan was approved, bringing it into line with the Territorial address plan with landscape plan value (PIT-PPR). With the resolution, the perimeter of the constraint of the coastal strip was redesigned so as to also include the port and retro-port operational areas of the port of Labroni, areas until then considered excluded from the constraint.

The central crux of the TAR ruling is all in the evolution of Law No 84/1994, the framework law on ports, and in particular of its article 5 which was rewritten by the Decree Law no. 121/2021, on the basis of which today the Authorities of the Port System approve a Planning Document Strategic System Plan (DPSS), consistent with the General Plan of the transport and logistics and with the European guidelines in ports, logistics and infrastructure networks as well as with the National Strategic Plan for Ports and logistics, which identifies the port areas and divides them in port, inland port and port-city interaction areas, while the Port Master Plan (PRP) implements detail to these forecasts. The key provision, referred to in the times by the judges, is paragraph 1-quinquies of Article 5: "The planning of port and inland port areas is exclusive competence of the Port System Authority, which provides for it through the approval of the PRP". The Municipality remains only the planning of the port-city interaction areas, and only after the opinion of the Port Authority. Not only that: paragraph 2-ter establishes today that "the PRP is a territorial plan of relevance and represents the only tool for planning and government of the territory within its own area of competence", a formula that overturns the previous relationship of subordination of the port plan compared to the general zoning plan municipality.

The Court also recalled on this point the Constitutional Court ruling no. 6/2023 which validated this New hierarchy between sectoral (port) plans and general plans (municipal), while declaring unconstitutional the provision that automatically equated port areas with urban areas of completion for the purposes of exclusion from the landscape constraint of referred to in art. 142, paragraph 2, of the Code of Cultural Heritage.

By applying this regulatory framework, the Regional Administrative Court for Tuscany has concluded that the Municipality of Livorno no longer had any title to include port and inland port areas in your plan and in the updating of the structural plan. These are areas whose planning is reserved exclusively to the Port Authority through the PRP, the only instrument for governing the territory within that perimeter. For that reason, the contested acts have been declared null and void for absolute lack of attribution, limited to the part in which they extend the perimeter of municipal planning to port and retro-port areas.

In addition, the judges rejected the defense argument of the Municipality of Livorno invoking the agreement signed on 8 November 2023 with the Port Authority to justify a regulation of "safeguarding/transitional" on port areas. That agreement - the panel observed - allowed at most a provisional regime limited only to the new areas included in the port perimeter expanded by the DPSS, and in any case only so as not to to jeopardize port uses, certainly not to extend them by way of permanent, through the landscape constraint ex lege, a substantially exclusionary discipline.

Commenting on the ruling of the Regional Administrative Court, the president of the Authority of the Port System of the Northern Tyrrhenian Sea, Davide Gariglio, pointed out that "the ruling does not deliver to the port a free zone from the landscape: it gives it back its own seat in which the landscape must be protected, which is the port master plan. È the same direction - Gariglio pointed out - that Parliament has indicated by the law on the enhancement of the sea resource, recognizing that port areas with strong infrastructure do not are intact coastal landscape and entrusting the Master Plan port delimitation. For companies it means the removal of a procedural burden that risked stopping investments already planned; for the Authority it means an extra responsibility, because that planning must now be completed in the time that the system requires. We will proceed with the adaptation of the master plan in force to the Strategic System Planning Document approved by ministerial decree of 11 July 2024, and to the identification, in that forum and in the confrontation with the Region Tuscany, the Municipality of Livorno and the Ministry of Culture, areas affected by significant and significant infrastructure. We thank the lawyers for the work done."