Italy Tenders MCP Server

@pipeworx/italy-tenders

Italian public-procurement tender notices from ANAC (Autorità Nazionale Anticorruzione), the national anti-corruption authority that runs Italy's tender/contract register. Fleet #3091.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1807+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• it_tender_search(query?, cpv?, buyer?, province?, date_from?, date_to?, limit?) -- search tender notices by free-text keyword (title + CPV category description), CPV classification code/prefix, buyer (contracting authority) name substring, Italian province, and a publish-date range (defaults to the last 90 days). Returns each notice's CIG, title, buyer, province/region, contract type, amount (EUR), status, CPV, publish date, offer deadline, and outcome when ANAC has recorded one.
• it_tender_detail(cig) -- the full record for one notice by its CIG (Codice Identificativo Gara), including buyer tax code, cost center, procedure type, realization mode, lot count, and outcome communication date.

Every response carries source, source_url, licence, data_as_of, and (on it_tender_search/no-match responses) window_from/window_to -- the span of months this pack currently holds -- so a caller can tell "no tenders on this topic" apart from "that date range isn't loaded".

Auth

Keyless. The tools answer only through the Pipeworx gateway, which holds the data; a standalone install has no data to read, and every tool returns a clear "store is not bound in this runtime" error there instead of an empty list.

Data sources

• Autorità Nazionale Anticorruzione (ANAC) -- Italy's national anti-corruption authority, which runs the country's public-procurement notice register. ANAC publishes the register as open data (dati.anticorruzione.it, a CKAN portal) but only as bulk monthly dumps: every contracts resource has datastore_active: false (no server-side search/filter), so this pack builds a store from ANAC's own "cig-YYYY" monthly CSVs (scripts/italy-tenders/load-data.mjs) rather than proxying per request. The only live endpoint ANAC exposes is a single-CIG lookup with no discovery path -- not useful for keyword/buyer/CPV/date search, which is what this pack answers.

  Licence (quoted verbatim from ANAC's own CKAN package_show API, checked live 2026-10-15): the cig-YYYY package reports "license_title": "Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0", "license_id": "CC-BY-SA-4.0"; each monthly resource additionally carries "license_type": "https://w3id.org/italia/controlled-vocabulary/licences/A31_CCBYSA40". CC-BY-SA-4.0 explicitly permits reuse and redistribution, with attribution and share-alike -- this is not a case the "mirror needs a reuse grant" rule (mirror-needs-grant-proxy-does-not, Bruce, 2026-09-08) holds for; the grant is already in the licence. Attribution is carried in every response's source/source_url fields.

Known gaps -- read before extending this pack

This pack holds a ROLLING RECENT WINDOW, not ANAC's full history. The cig register runs back to 2007 (cig-2007 through cig-2025 as separate yearly datasets on ANAC's portal); one month's CSV alone runs ~115-120k rows / ~100MB uncompressed (measured live for September 2025). Loading the full ~19-year history into one D1 database would dwarf every other store-backed pack here. it_tender_search/it_tender_detail report their loaded window (window_from/window_to, from the it_meta table) on every no-match response, so a caller can tell a genuinely empty result apart from a date outside what is loaded.

ANAC's OCDS twin of this data (ocds-appalti-ordinari-YYYY, also monthly) was checked and rejected for THIS pack's refresh: one month's JSON release package ran 748MB-3.1GB (measured live for 2026-03 and 2025-09), far larger than the CSV cig-YYYY resources used here for the same notices. Note also: ANAC/Italy already has a SEPARATE, slower-cadence presence in mcps/open-contracting (the OCP Data Registry's own weekly OCDS mirror of 18 countries) -- that coverage was confirmed live but stale (no latest_release recorded for Italy in oc_coverage, and sampled rows dated 2021-2022) at the time this pack was built, which is the actual gap this pack closes: ANAC/Italy with a genuinely recent window.

it_tender_detail's live-enrichment possibility (getSmartCig) was not wired. An earlier dropped build (fleet #3088) noted a live single-CIG lookup at api.anticorruzione.it/apicig/.../getSmartCig/{cig}; every path variant guessed during this build 404'd, and ANAC's own API gateway (api.anticorruzione.it/apicig/swagger/v1/swagger.json) also 404'd, so the exact live path could not be confirmed. Not critical: the loaded cig-YYYY CSV already carries full notice detail per CIG (status, outcome, cancellation fields), so it_tender_detail answers entirely from the store. If a working live endpoint is found later, it would only add enrichment ANAC communicates in between monthly refreshes.

Refreshing the data

node scripts/italy-tenders/load-data.mjs --months 2026-09,2026-10 [--retain-from 2025-11] [--init-schema on the very first run] -- downloads each requested month's cig-YYYY CSV zip from ANAC, streams and upserts rows into D1 (INSERT OR REPLACE, keyed by cig, so re-loading a month already present just refreshes rows ANAC updated -- e.g. an outcome communicated weeks after publication). Needs wrangler logged in to the Pipeworx Cloudflare account and the unzip CLI.

The GitHub workflow .github/workflows/italy-tenders-refresh.yml runs this monthly, re-pulling the current and previous two months (to catch late outcome updates) and rolling --retain-from forward so the table does not grow without bound.

Pre-deploy smoke testing (no production D1 needed)

node --experimental-strip-types scripts/italy-tenders/build-local-sqlite.mjs \
  --csv <a downloaded cig_csv_YYYY_MM.csv> --ym YYYY-MM --out /tmp/italy-tenders.sqlite
node --experimental-strip-types scripts/italy-tenders/smoke-local.mjs /tmp/italy-tenders.sqlite

Exercises the pack's real callTool() against a local SQLite file built from a real ANAC monthly CSV via a D1Like adapter -- same shape as scripts/fracfocus/{build-local-sqlite,smoke-local}.mjs.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "italy-tenders": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/italy-tenders/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/italy-tenders/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1807+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/it_tender_search \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"buyer":"COMUNE DI MILANO","date_from":"2025-12-01","date_to":"2025-12-31","limit":5}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/it_tender_search. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "italy-tenders": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-italy-tenders"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-italy-tenders

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Italy Tenders data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT