Cities, clubs, barracks: two notices to revive 36 Defense sites

State heritage. From Bolzano to Siracusa there are 33 assets to enhance (covering 182,000 square meters), plus three lighthouses. Deadline for offers is mid-November.

Historic palaces and villas in Florence, Padua, Taranto.
Barracks with large green areas, like the one in Anzio, just a few steps from the archaeological park and the Grotte di Nerone.
The sixteenth-century castle of Carlo V, in Capua, and also, the former seaplane base of Cagnano Varano, in the province of Foggia (pictured above), overlooking the Tremiti Islands.

Finally, in the municipality of Rome, a logistics center of about 850,000 square meters in the regional nature reserve of Decima-Malafede.

These are just some of the 33 real estate assets that Difesa Servizi - an in-house company of the Ministry of Defense that manages and enhances its assets - proposes to lease, for a maximum of 50 years, to Italian or foreign investors who submit a project finance proposal to redevelop and enhance them.
There is time until 12:00 on November 15 to submit offers and all documentation is available on the Difesa Servizi website.
The first expressions of interest have already been received, including one for the eighteenth-century Palazzo da Zara, in the historic center of Padua.
In total, there are over 182,000 square meters of covered area and approximately four million square meters of uncovered area located in 11 Regions and 28 Municipalities.
The average market value exceeds 240 million euros.

On November 20, the deadline expires for the direct concession tender to give a new life to three lighthouses, now remotely controlled, of the Italian Navy overlooking some of the most picturesque promontories of the Peninsula: Isola di Capo Rizzuto (Kr), Vieste (Fg), and Punta Polveraia, on the Island of Elba.

A third tender will be launched soon: these days Difesa Servizi is working to finalize the tender for the enhancement of military sites to be leased for the installation of photovoltaic systems.

In a country where - according to Ispra data - 2.4 square meters of land are cemented every second, recovering this heritage is of great value from an environmental, social, economic, tourist, and employment perspective.

The possibilities are many.
These are buildings used by the Army, Navy, and Air Force that Difesa Servizi has divided into four clusters, to suggest some enhancement possibilities: 17 assets could be reborn as tourist-accommodation destinations, such as senior housing or student residences; six clubs and mixed-use areas could be redeveloped as sports and recreational complexes.
Then six among logistic areas, warehouses, and storage facilities, some of which are located near strategic hubs such as Piacenza, Rome, Taranto.
Finally, the six seaplane bases.
It is also necessary to think outside the box: about lighthouses converted into relais, the growing phenomenon of glamping, or the magnetic effect that spaces dedicated to art have in unusual locations (details in the fact sheets).

"Difesa Servizi's priority in the real estate field is to manage, through adequate enhancement, the public heritage entrusted to it by the Ministry of Defense, whose real estate theme assumes particular relevance in the programmatic guidelines of Minister Crosetto," explains Luca Andreoli, CEO of Difesa Servizi. "Enhancing a property is a sometimes complex and articulated activity.
It is necessary to develop initiatives that seek the right integration between local urban policies, private real estate developments, and compliance with various constraints: cultural, landscape, archaeological," Andreoli continues.

There are many prestigious structures and some clusters - such as the seaplane bases - perhaps ignite more imagination than others, but the recovery costs are on average high and the timelines quite long. "The enhancement concession, for a maximum of 50 years, is proposed through the application of the normative instrument of the Project Finance which, in these cases, allows transforming, through the use of private resources, the management of a predominantly military-use asset into economic activities, according to the principle that we define as dual use (i.e. dual civil-military use)," Andreoli continues to explain.

The numbers tell of a company that is working well: the 2023 budget closed with a production value of around 81.7 million euros, and a growth of 7.6% over 2022.
A result to which all sectors contributed: from real estate to energy, from cultural to training.

To date, there are about 60 properties that Difesa Servizi has been tasked with enhancing.
Of these, 36 have been proposed to the market through the exploratory notice and the lighthouse tender.
There are 33 assets that Difesa Servizi has managed to enhance through private investments or is in the process of contracting, including 9 lighthouses.
Adding them up, the total area is about 600,000 square meters, leading to an estimated concession value of about 1.4 million euros for 2024 and an investment of private resources of about 360 million euros.