Acquario di Genova

Born as the centrepiece of Genoa's 1992 Columbus celebrations, the Aquarium of Genoa remains the defining attraction of the redeveloped Old Port. Designed by Renzo Piano's studio and enlarged since, it runs visitors through tropical, temperate and polar waters past sharks, dolphins, penguins and manatees — several hundred species in tanks built like suspended ship hulls.

Why it matters

The Aquarium is the most visible result of the urban transformation that turned Genoa's decayed medieval harbour into the Porto Antico cultural quarter. The Ministry of Culture's contemporary architecture atlas records that Genoa hosted the International Exhibition "Cristoforo Colombo" in 1992, marking five hundred years since the discovery of America, and that Renzo Piano led the redesign of the port front facing the historic centre; the aquarium and neighbouring buildings, in the ministry's words, completely transformed this urban waterfront.

Its scale is hard to overstate. The operator, Costa Edutainment, presents it as the largest aquarium in Italy and one of the major aquariums in Europe and lists about 400 animal species and 200 plant species across 12,000 square metres of exhibition space, with roughly 12,000 specimens. Genoa's official tourism portal, marking the thirtieth anniversary, counted more than a million visitors a year and over 33 million since the 1992 opening. For the destination, this is the anchor that proved a heritage port city could also lead in modern, science-driven tourism.

What to notice

• The building is a long, low pavilion with tanks shaped like ship hulls, suspended on reinforced-concrete columns that conceal service plant beneath the quay.
• The route through five great environments — tropical seas, temperate seas, cold seas, tropical forests and fresh water — with clownfish and zebra sharks, Magellanic penguins, Antillean manatees and dwarf caimans along the way.
• The Cetacean Pavilion, opened in 2013, with four semi-submerged tanks visible only from the interior route and from above, where bottlenose dolphins represent the eight cetacean species of the Pelagos Sanctuary, the large Mediterranean marine protected area.
• The manatees: Genoa's portal describes the aquarium as one of the European facilities caring for these "sirens of the sea" within a conservation project linking some twenty structures.
• The Padiglione Biodiversità aboard the Nave Italia contains nineteen tanks dedicated to the Mediterranean, tropical habitats and Madagascar.

Context and history

The aquarium belongs to a family of Renzo Piano projects that reshaped the waterfront: the ministry's atlas places the aquarium's construction between 1985 and 2001, the glass Biosfera between 2001 and 2004, and the Cetacean Pavilion between 2007 and 2013. The interior scenography was entrusted to Peter Chermayeff, whose two-level circulation along a central wooden walkway was, at the opening, among the most advanced in the world. Where the original building looked inward at ocean basins, the later pavilions turned the concept outward — towards Mediterranean conservation, biodiversity education and the port landscape itself.

The choice of site is part of the story: Ponte Spinola juts into a basin that once handled the Republic's trade, so a visit doubles as an encounter with Genoa's maritime geography, reinforced by the neighbouring Galata Museo del Mare and the visitable submarine Nazario Sauro.