Empty docks in Trieste and red alert in Gioia Tauro. Italian ports, in the days of the geopolitical and commercial crisis in the Red Sea, are reckoning with setbacks to goods traffic between Europe and the East. Over the past week, the narrow Suez Canal that connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean has experienced a 35-40 percent drop in ship passages and their containers. Not even during the first lockdown, the total lockdown of spring 2020, had the Gulf of Trieste been so empty. Today, however, the waters of the northernmost slice of the Adriatic Sea, a trade gateway to Central Europe, are a wasteland. The Suez crisis, with the continuing attacks on commercial convoys by the Yemeni Huthi armed group and the Anglo-American operation against rebel positions, threatens to bring the Adriatic's main ports to their knees: in fact, no container ships have been arriving in Trieste since December 28. If ships, as is now the case, choose the route that involves rounding the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, it is obvious that once headed to Europe they will end up choosing the port of Hamburg and not Trieste. From the port of Venice, too, the developments of the crisis in the Middle East are being watched with concern, and the drastic reduction in shipping is beginning to strike fear into the hearts of southern ports as well.
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