The fight for Italian beaches heats up
Debate over how clubs along the country’s coastline are run intensifies as attendances fall off
Spending summers at the beach for Italians is as traditional as eating pasta. For decades, families throughout the peninsula have rented out beach umbrellas, which come with chairs and a sunbed, for the season at their local beach club. Children often visit daily with their nonni, with working parents showing up at the weekends.
There are about 7,300 beach clubs in Italy, according to Unioncamere, the chambers of commerce association. In regions with the highest concentration of beach establishments, such as Liguria, Tuscany and Emilia Romagna, less than 30 per cent of the beaches has been estimated to be freely accessible, with clubs occupying the rest.
Due to the sweltering heat in Milan this summer, I opted to tag along with a group of friends at a Tuscan beach town in July. Weekend after weekend I was shocked at how empty our beach club and the ones nearby were compared with our previous outings years ago. This appears to have been an issue not just for these clubs, but for many across Italy.
Data released by industry groups Sib and Assobalneari showed that national beach club attendance was down by at least 25 per cent in July compared with the same month in 2024. At Ferragosto, a national holiday on August 15 that represents the peak of the summer season, the number of Italians travelling dropped by 1mn from last year.
Fabrizio Licordari, president of the Assobalneari, said the drop was due to “a very critical economic situation amid rising utilities, food, petrol and housing costs with many Italian families struggling to make ends meet”.
Though unemployment is at historically low levels, an OECD report published last month shows real wages have dropped by 7.5 per cent since 2021, placing Italy below the EU average for salaries adjusted for purchasing power.
According to Istat, the national statistics agency, a day at the beach is 32 per cent more expensive this year than it was in 2019. The average weekly price for a beach umbrella is now €212, and the figure can be 10 times higher at establishments catering to the super-rich. Many Italians opted for cheaper destinations such as Albania or Cyprus. Rising temperatures are also leading many to shun beaches for the mountains.
The fall off in demand for the beach clubs is taking a toll on Italy’s important tourism industry, with knock-on effects on local economies along the peninsula’s coast. This has intensified a debate over how the clubs are run and how much they cost.
First, though the coastline is a public asset, the clubs are privately operated through multiyear concession agreements that have long pitted Rome against Brussels. Under a 19-year-old EU directive, new and existing concessions must be publicly tendered. Yet, successive Italian governments have opted to apply a local 1992 law, which essentially extends existing ones — often passed down the generations — indefinitely at a ridiculously cheap price. Tenders are currently scheduled from the end of 2027, but for the time being, the average concessions agreement can cost as little as €270 per month, a little more than the average weekly price for a single sun umbrella. Fees can by tiny even for luxury resorts.
While increasing concession fees through tenders or charging royalties isn’t going to have a cooling effect on price rises, the yearly €100mn that currently ends up in state coffers from beach concession fees has seemed slim to critics compared with the industry’s profits.
Many beach club operators now claim tenders would be unfavourable to them due to the money spent on upgrades, which they would not be able to recover. Licordari said last month that Italy should not be forced to give away its beaches to foreign players by the European Commission. Giorgia Meloni’s government has proposed a system where outgoing operators would be indemnified by their successors based on calculations that have been criticised by both Brussels and Italy’s administrative courts.
Aristide Police, dean of Rome’s Luiss University’s law school, says the proposal would be hard to put into practice because most of these upgrades haven’t been properly recorded. An actual estimate of clubs’ revenues is also complicated with many holidaymakers, including foreigners, still opting for cash payments. This suggests part of these establishments’ revenues escapes taxation.
Police points out that Italian and EU law require the beach concessions to be tendered in order to offer a level playing field to all market participants. “Whereas what we have here is an ingrained system where beach concessions have been passed on within families for sixty years,” he says.