A new RF photo-injector has been designed, realized and successfully installed at the SPARC_LAB facility (INFN-LNF, Frascati, Rome). It is based on a 1.6 cell RF gun fabricated with the new brazing free technology recently developed at the National Laboratories of Frascati. The electromagnetic design has been optimized to have a full compensation of the dipole and quadrupole field components introduced by the coupling hole with an improvement of the effective pumping speed with two added pumping ports. The gun is overcoupled (\beta=2) to reduce the filling time and to allow the operation with short RF pulses. The overall injector integrates a new solenoid with a remote control of the transverse position and a variable skew quadrupole for the compensation of residual quadrupole field components. It also allows an on axis laser injection system with the last mirror in air, and the possibility of a future integration of an X/C band cavity linearizer. In the paper we report the main characteristics of the electromagnetic and mechanical design and the low and high power test results that shows the extremely good perfomances of the new device. Proceedings of the 13th International Particle Accelerator Conference, IPAC2022, Bangkok, Thailand
