Walking along Italian beaches is like strolling through a rainbow. The sand will be subdivided into colours: for 50 metres or so the perfectly spaced parasols and deck chairs will be all red, then they become orange, then yellow, green and so on.
These are the country’s famous bagni (lidos), formally known as concessioni balneari (bathing concessions). They’re simple but stylish. The sand is raked at dawn. The bar plays ambient music and serves negronis or fried squid. There will probably be a table-tennis table, or a beach volleyball area. Some have swimming pools.
Everything about these lidos is orderly. Deck chairs are priced with the precision of theatre tickets, with spaces by the water often costing double those by the bar (in Milano Marittima this summer, on the less glamorous Adriatic coast, a parasol and two deck chairs cost €30 by the bar, but up to €60 by the water). Many families rent a space all summer, year after year.
Sometimes you have to walk for a mile or two before finding a spiaggia libera, a beach free of private lidos where bathers are allowed to put their towels on the sand and plant their own parasol. Those “free beaches” are invariably in the remote and less attractive areas, near an estuary or an eyesore, or where the sand gives way to rocks. They often have a litter issue, with ice‑cream wrappers dumped in the sand. There are no lifeguards or loos.
“This set-up is crazy,” says one Dutch holidaymaker I meet on a free beach near Naples. “I tried to sit down on the beach over there,” he points towards the private lidos, “and they shooed me away. And here,” he shrugs, “there’s no toilet, no shower, no bin … ”
The fight between privatised and free beaches, and the issue of how to manage Italy’s almost 8,000km (4,971 miles) of coastline, has become a controversial toa 2022 report from Legambiente (an Italian environmental organisation) calculated that about 43% of Italy’s sandy coasts are now occupied by private businesses.
Danilo Ruggiero, director of the Mare Libero (Free Sea) campaign, says: “Beaches have been transformed into little resorts – these complexes can include swimming pools, car parks, gyms, restaurants and clothes shops.” Ruggiero lives in Ostia, just west of Rome, where 80% of the town’s beach is what he calls “the united states of lidos”. “Defences have been built around the area – walls, gates, fences and hedges – to prevent access and block the view. Often, for several kilometres, you cannot even see the sea.”
Tuscany and Romagna are the regions with the most densely privatised beaches. In Forte dei Marmi, on the west-facing sand of the Tuscan coast, 94% of the town beachfront is rented to resorts. Nearby, in Pietrasanta and Camaiore, it’s 98.8% and 98.4%, respectively. Until recently, Gatteo a Mare, on the Adriatic coast, didn’t have a single free beach; following public outrage, it does now have 1.4% of free beach – 10 metres of a total of about 700 metres.
Because running a lido is a very profitable, often cash-in-hand operation, they are attractive investments for organised crime, and the campaign for more free beaches has often overlapped with a wider anti‑mafia pushback. But the beach issue also feeds into a question overwhelmed Italians are frequently asking themselves: how to combat the excesses of overtourism without turning beauty spots into theme parks? How can everyone enjoy the seaside if there’s just not enough space on the sand?
Bacoli is a town that forms the very north‑western tip of the Gulf of Naples. It’s a stunning but unstable place: active and extinct volcanoes have created concentric circles of crater lakes and rocky peninsulas in the sea. The whole town sits on the bubbling magma of the Phlegraean Fields, with the roads and buildings frequently lifted or dropped by ground movement (called bradyseism), causing cracks and potholes.
“Here,” Fabio Ciciliano, the national head of Italy’s civil protection department, tells me, “they’re not living on a volcano but inside one.”
“It’s like the game of the goose,” laughs the town’s mayor, the long-haired, 39-year-old Josi Gerardo Della Ragione, bouncing his hand up and down to mean that, as with snakes- and-ladders, his town is battling the whims of fortune.
Della Ragione – or Josi as he is universally known – has become nationally famous for his battle to liberate his town’s beaches from private profiteers. “Until recently,” he tells me, “our beaches were cluttered with illegal sheds, barbed wire, gates and intercoms.” Access to various beaches was through one compound or other. “You had to ring the intercom,” he explains, “and [their response was] I’ll open the gate if I know you.” The mayor says it’s a “clientelistic, friends-of-my-friends” arrangement that typifies the mindset here.
The issue of beach access is felt particularly deeply in Naples because the city has the sea in its soul. No self‑respecting Neapolitan troubadour is without a tribute to O Mare in their repertoire. Naples port authority runs the allocation of concessions, and many feel that the distribution between public and private is very skewed: in Campania (the region surrounding Naples) the percentage of private concessions is 70%, and in Naples itself 95%.
Della Ragione says many lidos gained their licences through paying fines. “They occupied a stretch of water and a stretch of beach,” he says. “At the end of the summer, they were fined by the port authority for unauthorised occupation.” Through what the mayor calls “legalised squatting”, the fines became a way of legitimising the occupation; abusivi storici (historical unauthorised occupants) is the judicial definition of many of the lidos he is now taking on.
“It’s obvious that public property seized by force and bullying will be defended by force and bullying,” says Della Ragione. On one beach, Casevecchie, Della Ragione deployed heavy machinery to dismantle illegal buildings on public land. “We had to bring in bulldozers to demolish warehouses,” he says. “In one, we found the person running the warehouse with a chainsaw, heading towards the council workers. Those are the kind of crimes we’re dealing with.”
Della Ragione has been in the fight for a long time. Seventeen years ago he co-created a social media campaign called FreeBacoli. He had a sideline as a sports journalist and is a skilled listener. He constantly denounced malfeasance in local government, leading to an arson attack on his family’s delicatessen. But in 2015, aged just 28, he was elected mayor with almost 65% cast. Although his administration fell after only a year in power, he came back in 2019. He has been Bacoli’s mayor for seven years now.
What makes Bacoli unusual is that the town council owns more than a quarter of the 13 sq km land, of which 60% is coastal. Many appealing sites fell into the hands of the local mafia, the Camorra. Villa Ferretti is a 19th-century villa built next to Roman ruins that are still visible below the clear water of Pozzuoli bay. There’s a public beach – maybe less than 100 metres long – just to the right of the villa’s balconies. The Ferretti family were rich Genoans, but the villa eventually fell into hands of the Pariante family, a notorious Camorra clan, who closed public access to a beach.
The property was seized by the Italian Anti-Mafia Investigation Division in 1995 and transferred to the municipality of Bacoli in 2003. In 2016, the town’s council transformed the beach and garden into a public park and created an outdoor theatre, restoring public access to the beach and leasing the villa to the University of Naples Federico II.
In many ways, Della Ragione’s position on beaches is no different from his broad political vision. “What we’ve tried to do,” he says, “is to give the city back to its citizens, based on the idea that the public administration does not hand out favours and does not engage in patronage.” It’s a vision of politics that sometimes struggles to put down roots in southern Italy where, according to Della Ragione, the “public good” is seen “as a cake to be divided up among friends, voters and relatives”.
Miseno beach is another flashpoint in Bacoli. It’s a curving finger of sand just over half a mile long. But you can’t get to it from the modern road named after Pliny the Elder. There are triumphal arches leading to private resorts, and free parking for members, but unless you know where the narrow corridors are between those resorts you will struggle to see, let alone stand on, the sand.
“They’re all military beaches,” says Della Ragione. “There’s the navy with one resort, the air force with another, the Italian army with two, and the coastguard with one.” If you include the nearby Guardia di Finanza resort, that makes about 100,000 sq metres of Miseno sand given over to exclusive use.
But when you finally find an alleyway between military installations, it’s worth it. The water is cool and clear, and the famous islands – Procida, Ischia and Capri – feel so close you could swim to them. To the left, there are a dozen caves, once used as storage by the Roman navy.
Two thousand years ago these saltwater lakes and embracing bays turned Bacoli into the chosen port for Rome’s elite fleet, the Classis Misenensis. Underground aqueducts ushered freshwater directly to the sailors from a reservoir – the Piscina Mirabilis – whose ceiling had circular skylights casting oblique beams on to the water.
So this has always been a militarised zone. But on Miseno’s beach the military presence is nothing to do with training and drills, only deck chairs and economics. In the military lidos, un pezzo (“a piece”, either a deck chair or a parasol) costs only €3 (plus free parking). In the non-military lidos each “piece” will cost €7 in the low season, €10 in the high (and no parking). “We’re being undercut,” says one barman of a non‑military lido, who bemoans the unfair competition.
The managers of the military resorts are not in uniform. They’re local lads who are unconnected to the military: they offer coffee at 60 cents – half what it costs elsewhere – and say anyone is welcomed to eat in their subsidised restaurants. They are so used to the unfair advantage, they don’t even seem to notice it.
Eventually you come to a shell of a building, chained closed but full of graffiti. This is the “free beach”. It seems almost deliberately grotty, with wet wipes and straws in the sand. The issue of litter is an argument the private operators often refer to; it is, they say, inevitable that public beaches will be dirty. But the vibe here is different. Instead of perpendicular seating, there are various groups sitting round a Bluetooth speaker.
I speak to a man called Marco and wonder about the grottiness. “We have to fight a cultural battle,” he says. “Because when I go to certain free beaches there’s no bin and people put cigarette butts and bottle tops in the sand. It needs a bit of education, a bit of culture … ”
For years, activists from Mare Libero have held flashmobs and beach occupations in hotspots where access is being constantly restricted. Donn’Anna beach, just west of Naples, had been gated since 1999. Citizens could only access it at the discretion of the keyholder, the manager of a lido called Bagno Elena. Even if one got access, finding a free space in the height of summer would be almost impossible: of the beach’s4,490 sq metres, only 290 were considered free.
The Naples chapter of Mare Libero waged a campaign to “liberate” the beach, organising sit-ins and arguing in court that a closed gate was in contravention of access rights. Naples port authority appealed against the gate’s removal but lost its case. In February 2026, the Campania regional administrative court upheld Mare Libero’s cause and Donn’Anna beach is finally freely accessible, a victory that Mare Libero is hoping to replicate along the peninsula.
In these tense spaces, Della Ragione is offering a sort of socialist optimism: his battle for beach access is part of his plan to re-common all the land in the town council’s possession. “The sum of every individual interest is less than the common good,” he says.
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Della Ragione has an unusual skill set. He combines the communication skills of an influencer (constantly being quoted and photographed in his tricolour sash, and sharing his personal phone number online in emergencies) with the bureaucratic abilities of an elderly lawyer. His comms come across as both natural and calculated. “In this age of communication, if you don’t say you’ve done something, it’s as if you hadn’t done it. You have to do it and you have to say you’ve done it.” But his high visibility is also an insurance: what he’s doing is dangerous (he has received death threats) and his national notoriety affords him some protection.
Although the mayor seems revolutionary, he’s also a stickler for formality. He refuses to receive people in shorts, and local people tell stories, possibly apocryphal, of groups of visitors sharing one pair of trousers outside the mayor’s offices. When I go to a local boutique and explain why I have to buy a pair, the owner of the shop laughs: “This happens all the time.”
When you walk around the town with Della Ragione, people constantly approach and ask to shake his hand. Others wave and call out, “Sindaco!” (mayor). The adulation is constant. And if you talk to anyone in town – shopkeepers, bathers, friends – they express real love for “Josi”. “Fa bene,” everyone says (more or less, “He’s doing a good job”).
And you can feel what Bacolesi are trying to create here. At sunset, teenagers play canoe-polo on Miseno’s saltwater lake. There’s a new beach volleyball court on the retaken Casevecchie sand, its floodlights powered by solar panels. At midnight, toddlers move waist-high chess pieces for their parents, who are playing with ice‑creams in their hands. “It’s a positive micro-story of a slow and widespread regeneration,” Klarissa Pica, a research fellow at Venice’s IUAV university, wrote in her doctoral thesis, Territorio Mare (Territorial Waters).
“We don’t want any war with ‘the forces of order’,” says Della Ragione, chuckling at the absurdity of the idea, “but we do want an account with reality: these are private clubs that take away from the idea that the beach is for everyone. In 2026 this is absolutely intolerable.”
This evolution of lidos from tiny booths into mega resorts has taken almost a century. In the early 20th century, the Italian state began renting rectangles of sand (part of the demanio, or state property) to businesses that sold coffee and liqueurs and rented chairs. It wasn’t somewhere the wealthy went: they drank in the grand cafes of the main square or on their own boats.
Even after 1945, Italy’s long beaches weren’t glamorous. They were associated with warfare – littered with shrapnel and abandoned military equipment – or with wilderness. They were windswept spaces for driftwood, loners, lovers and criminals.
But what had started as small kiosks grew as tourism boomed from the 1960s onwards. Bagni began building seating areas, erecting outbuildings, plumbing in showers and loos, digging pools and fencing sports areas and restaurants. In the pines behind the sand, many created parking spaces and campsites. Some of it was legal, some not.
The rental agreements of these spaces were invariably “rollover” ones, renewing automatically. Until 2020, the minimum annual rent for a beach resort was a paltry €364 and, according to Italy’s court of auditors’ report for 2016-20, the state received only €101.7m a year from these lidos, a tiny sum for an industry estimated to generate €7-8bn.
The m ancient privileges that have made running a bagno blissfully profitable. Many resorts cater for weddings, birthdays, baptisms and graduations, and some have been revealed to be taking more in an evening than they pay in annual rent. It has been calculated that the average annual profit of a beach resort is still a tidy €260,000.
This was all supposed to end in 2006, when the EU’s Bolkestein directive obliged member countries to offer coastal concessions for a “limited duration, and through an open public selection procedure, based on non-discriminatory, transparent and objective criteria”. The directive was meant to break up protectionist practices and open up the beaches to internal competition.
But successive Italian governments have avoided implementing the legislation by issuing proroghe(extensions) to delay any tender process. First there was an extension until 2012, then until 2015, then it was moved to 2020. In 2018, the “yellow-green” government (the League-Five Star Movement coalition) passed a law extending the status quo (of lido’s renting the sand long-term) until 2033.
Recently, the Italian state has attempted to make things fairer. It raised the minimum annual rent for a beach concession to €2,500 and then €3,225.50. Beach resorts pay VAT at 22% rather than, as with all other tourist operators, the discounted rate of 10%. The lidos also pay IMU, the Italian property tax, usually only required of actual owners, although that has caused its own problems: according to Ruggiero, “those who manage beach concessions believe that they’re in some way owners. And if the owner sees you going into their space, you’re perceived as an intruder in their own house.”
The beach debate tends to pan out along clear left-right lines. For the left, it’s an obvious example of public ownership and access. Italy’s large rump of former socialists and communists say that the perversity of capitalism is revealed by even shade being commercialised. For the activists of Mare Libero, freeing beaches isn’t a frivolous campaign, but a civil rights one informed by ecology and inclusion. Pica believes that beaches are an issue of spatial, as well as social, justice. She sees in these struggles an echo of Roman law’s concept that “rescommunisomnium” (“a thing common to all”) should be considered “resextracommercium” (“a thing outside commerce”).
For the right, though, these concessions are a vital and patriotic pillar of one of Italy’s most important industries: tourism. The sector accounts for 9.6% of the country’s GDP, according to a 2023 study by Italy’s National Institute of Statistics. Of the country’s almost 477 million tourists (both internal and external), 39.2% spend time at the sea, and no patriotic politician wants to mess with such a buoyant industry.
Neither Giorgia Meloni (the prime minister), nor Matteo Salvini (the League leader in coalition with Meloni), nor Roberto Vannacci (a retired army general who is a rising star of the far right and outside the government) ever criticise the status quo of beach resorts. Some have even invested in them: Daniela Santanchè, the scandal-hit former minister of tourism, was a shareholder in Flavio Briatore’s Twiga (a luxury lido in Forte dei Marmi); and Massimo Casanova – a former MEP for the League – owns Papeete (another luxury resort) in Milano Marittima, where Salvini is a regular.
The bagni do have an important role to play, they claim: protecting beach safety. “In Italy we’re fortunate to have half the drownings that they do in France,” says Antonio Capacchione, the president of SIB, the Italian union of balneari. According to Capacchione, that’s largely down that to the fact that lidos have a humanitarian obligation to provide lifeguard services and would face manslaughter charges if they neglected safety regulations.
Defenders of the lido system also argue that in an era of overtourism, they play a role in protecting the coastline. Certain cities and towns in Italy are, given post-Covid travel mania, unrecognisable. The number of beds available to tourists in Venice recently surpassed the number of locals’ beds. Trevi fountain in Rome is now imposing bookings and €2 tickets.
That’s happening on the beaches, too. Punta is one of Sardinia’s prize beaches: its petiteness – just a dusting of sand between rocky outposts and a transparent sea – is what makes it so appealing. And it undeniably needs protection from thousands of visitors who come with drones, tents, picnics and charcoal(a fire last year torched dozens of cars). So, in June, Villasimius town council announced it would charge visitors €10 and limit numbers to 150 people and 70 cars. Controversially, personal parasols couldn’t be brought on to the beach unless the party included a person over 65 or under 10.
After national outrage – and many jokes about this being the only valid reason to bring children or grandparents on holiday – Villasimius council increased the numbers to 190 people and 90 cars. But the outrage went to the heart of the debate about how to protect a fragile coastline from being overwhelmed by vehicles and humans. It’s also, obviously, an ecological question. With rising sea levels, ever-increasing meteorological violence and scorching temperatures, Italy’s coastline is acutely vulnerable to erosion, pollution, drought and forest fires.
Despite the ferocity of the debate, all sides agree on one thing: that the simple, sandy beach holds a cherished place in the memories and identities of Italians. For millions, my family included, deck-chair-and-parasol slumming has been how the long school holidays are lived. “From June to September,” Pica says, “pensioners have their beach umbrella at the same beach, with the same beach operator, and they’re surrounded by all their beach friends – so, for them, that’s what enjoying the seaside is all about.”
“I’ve been coming here for 30 years,” says one sunbather I talk to in a lido in Cuma, just north of Bacoli. She’s a retired woman looking after her two grandchildren. “I’ve known all my neighbours” – she points at the deck chairs all round her – “for decades.” It’s clear that Italians, on the whole, expect their beach experience to be curated, predictable and orderly.
It is uncertain what will happen next in the standoff between the EU and Italy. According to Capacchione, any tender process should contain clauses covering compensation (“indennizzo”) for investments in infrastructure, and a stipulation that preferential treatment be given to bidders with consolidated experience in the sector.
That, to Ruggiero, sounds like a stitch-up. “As regards compensation: the concession is fixed term, so once it has expired – and you have made full use of it until the very end – why should I compensate you? It’s like someone saying, ‘I rent a house and then claim compensation’ – compensation for what?”
The “experience clause” is even more problematic for Ruggiero. “Given that the market has been frozen, who else can claim to have experience in running beachside businesses other than those who have been running them up to now?” He summarises the current government’s position as: “I can’t grant you an extension, but I’ll make sure you win the tenders.” It is, he says, a very Italian solution to the problem.
Tobias Jones lives in Parma. He is the author of Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football. To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Per Elisa, the TV adaptation of his book Blood on the Altar, is streaming on ITVX.
