The notoriously regulated world of Italian beaches has long been a source of irritation and, occasionally, acrimony, during the long hot month of August. If you are prepared to pay for the private beach clubs, sunbathing on the emerald coast or the Italian Riviera can be a delightful and ordered experience.
However, less prosperous sun-seekers, hoping to find an acceptable patch of public sand for free, often find themselves in an unseemly scrum. This summer, as austerity bites in Italy, class war has broken out on Italy’s coast.
Record numbers of ordinary Italians are forsaking the traditional month-long summer break by the sea, according to Rosario Trefiletti, president of consumer group Federconsumatori.
“For the first time,” Trefiletti said, “the number of Italians enjoying a real holiday has plunged to around 37 percent, not counting those who are eking out time off using long weekends.”
Low-wage earners, he added, are having a “horrible summer,” in unusually scorching temperatures.
The Italian daily La Repubblica this month portrayed the plight of a typical pensioner left in an Italian city who would find a supermarket where he could mix with other old people “all in search of air conditioning, some cruising for hours, with one lemon in their trolley.”
The rich, on the other hand, have never had it so good. The luxury beach club scene is enjoying an unprecedented boom in places such as Lerici, where the wife of the pop star Zucchero has just opened Eco del Mare, a sandy cove for the select where masseurs, physiotherapists and a hairdresser wander among the luxury beach beds. A private lift takes bathers down to the sands and the entrance fee for a day is 83 euros (US$105).
The excluded hoi polloi are furious.
“These clubs and their prices are a sign of the cultural decline of Italy,” said Carlo Rienzi, president of a second consumer group, Codacons. “Take Paraggi, near Portofino, where you choose between a few square meters of free beach or pay 110 euros for two sun beds at the beach club where the sea is filthy anyway.”
“It demonstrates the stupidity of rich people who want to pay just to be close to Portofino,” he said.
Coughing up 110 euros for an umbrella, cabin and Wi-Fi for a day at Paraggi’s Bagni Fiore club allows the status-conscious to bathe in view of the seafront villa owned by Dolce & Gabbana and the palatial holiday home and park rented this year by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s son, Pier Silvio.
“There is always a demand for places here from rich customers who can spend without feeling the pinch,” spokesman Gianni Di Meo said.
Like all beach clubs in Italy, the high-end operations occupy public land, paying an often tiny fee to the state for use of the beach, but justifying their high prices with luxury services. At clubs in Forte dei Marmi, where an umbrella for a season can cost 14,000 euros, personal trainers prowl among the deckchairs.
Eco del Mare’s owners have defended the costly upgrade, which has reportedly seen the dowdy Milanese magistrates who frequented the club replaced by a chic clientele.
“It was the clients themselves who demanded the extra services,” club secretary Silvia Marini said.
Even down-at-heel beach clubs are squeezing out regular Italians, with a couple typically spending 37 euros for a day at the sea, including beds, umbrella, water and a sandwich; far more than the 23 to 25 euros in Greece or Spain. Consumers’ rights campaigners are demanding radical reform to the system.
Meanwhile, the Italian tax authorities have caught the resentful mood. They have set up checkpoints in ports and interrogated well-heeled yachtsmen, including the ageing rock star Vasco Rossi, after discovering that 64 percent of all yachts in Italy are registered to frontmen or companies to avoid paying tax on them.
Rossi, who has a 24m yacht called Jamaica, promised fans through his Web site that he paid his taxes and the check was a routine matter.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.