Marettimo, Italy

Marettimo, Italy: Submarine Cable Landing Point

Marettimo is one of the Aegadian Islands in the Mediterranean Sea, located west of Sicily and forming part of the municipality of Favignana in the Province of Trapani. As an island community, its connection to submarine cable infrastructure is a natural consequence of its geographic position, separated from the Italian mainland and from Sicily by open water. One submarine cable currently lands at Marettimo, linking the island within a broader Italian domestic cable network.

The single cable serving Marettimo is the Piano Isole Minori, a domestic Italian system whose endpoints remain entirely within Italy. The corridor this cable enables is therefore an intra-national, inter-island one, providing connectivity between Marettimo and other Italian landing points rather than reaching across international borders.

Cables Landing at Marettimo

Piano Isole Minori is a submarine cable system with a total length of 830 km, with a ready-for-service date of 2024 (draft status). All of its endpoints are located within Italy, making it a domestic cable designed to connect Italian islands and coastal communities. As its name suggests — Piano Isole Minori translates broadly to "Minor Islands Plan" — the system is oriented toward providing submarine cable connectivity to smaller Italian island communities, of which Marettimo is one beneficiary.

Regional Context

Within Italy's submarine cable landscape, which spans 37 cables across 55 landing points, Marettimo hosts a single cable and ranks within the top 80 percent of Italian landing points by cable count. Nearby Mazara del Vallo on the Sicilian mainland hosts nine cables, and Catania hosts five, reflecting the considerably greater cable density found at larger, more accessible Italian coastal cities. Marettimo's position as a small island landing point is comparable to Lampedusa, another island landing point in Italy that also hosts two cables.

Network Role

Marettimo functions as a single-cable terminus within Italy's domestic submarine cable network. Its sole connection, the Piano Isole Minori system, is oriented toward intra-Italian island connectivity rather than international or intercontinental routing. This places Marettimo in a distinct category from multi-cable Italian hubs such as Genoa or Bari, which serve as nodes in international cable corridors.

In the broader Italian submarine cable graph, Marettimo represents the extension of domestic cable infrastructure to smaller island communities that would otherwise lack direct submarine cable access. The Piano Isole Minori system, with its 2024 draft RFS date, reflects Italy's continuing effort to bring its minor islands into the national cable network, and Marettimo is one point in that developing topology.