T.net to turn popular Italian tourist destination into smart city prototype

T.net, an EIT Digital portfolio startup is turning the wonderful Southern Italian tourist town of Taormina into a smart city.

Thanks to the futuristic ‘Taormina City Tech’ Project, led by T.net with the support and collaboration of the city’s municipality, everything from mobility and waste collection to the lighting system will be managed via a network of intelligent sensors.

The project was officially unveiled in July 2021 during the "Catania 2030: Green Expo of the Mediterranean" Tradeshow and is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year.

The Sicilian village, so far famous for its marvelous landscape, marine beauties and historical monuments, will soon become a showcase and a model for all other smart city projects in Italy.

The smart system of Taormina City Tech leverages 5Ghz wireless networking, enabling the creation of an IoT network and a C-V2X (vehicle-to-everything) corridor for "CAV" (Connected Autonomous Vehicles), able to significantly improve in real-time intermodal communication and the overall travel experience.

By successfully managing the interaction between the vehicles, the road infrastructure, and the infrastructure users, it is possible to ease the burden of heavy traffic flow, making it simpler for citizens and tourists to move across the city.

For instance, it is possible to calculate waiting times at toll booths, travel times from the highway to the city center and to show available municipal parking stalls. Moreover, the system monitors the cable-car tourist service, keeping passengers informed of the waiting times for the next trip.

T.net’s technology allows authorities to save and optimize resources by using smart lighting systems, metering systems for pollutants and monitoring systems for garbage bins. With citizens’ collaboration, it is possible to trigger a virtuous process leading into a ‘smart community’.

The Taormina Tech City system is modular and based on the Smart City Block, a 2-kilometer squared area that can be integrated and enriched with cloud microservices, such as smart retail or smart health solutions. Its modular structure makes replication and scaling simple.

“Making an extraordinary city like Taormina the first Smart City in Italy is a challenge that we immediately accepted, full of enthusiasm and determination. We are doing this using innovative and modular IoT technologies, replicable in other contexts and expandable with additional services. We would like to thank the Mayor of Taormina for the trust and the citizens for their collaboration,” the CEO of T.net, Francesco Mazzola, said.

Based in Milan, Italy, T.net is focused on providing companies and public administrations with a comprehensive series of digital services and engineering solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud, Cybersecurity and Data Protection. The company joined the EIT Digital Accelerator in 2018 and later continued its journey with EIT Digital, becoming a partner in 2021.

EIT Digital and T.net share the same goal: using digital technology to create innovative business opportunities, improving the lives of European citizens. The Taormina City Tech project is a great example, on how this high-level ambition can be turned into a successful best practice.