The port of Genoa (in the acronym GOA) is the largest Italian port by extension (700 hm2 of land spaces and 500 hm² of water mirrors, 22 km of docks and draft-level derricks between the eight meters of the passenger drops to fifteen meters of the large container terminals of the VTE and SECH), the first in the country for the number of shipping lines and for handling containers with final destination (and more generally for different volume of goods), the most relevant from an employment point of view (more than ten thousand direct workers, about thirty thousand considering the related industries), and the first for volumes moved up to 2013, the year in which the port of Trieste exceeded it (mainly due to a substantial increase in the movement of liquid bulk at the SIOT oil pipeline) .
Its historic international value, combined with its marked multi-functionality (the port of Genoa moves any type of goods, builds, repairs, transforms and demolishes ships), the concentration of professionalism of the sector and its economic weight, make it the undisputed capital of Italian naval transport.
In 2016 it marked the historical record of traffic with 2,297,917 TEU.