A summer without vacationers on Italian beaches

RomeEmpty sun loungers and closed umbrellas. This has been the picture of this summer in Italy. Exorbitant prices and the fall in purchasing power have forced many families to cut back on their summer vacations, and almost half of Italians (49.2%) have stayed home in July and August. With the season over, the numbers aren't adding up for tour operators.

From Liguria to Sicily, the Italian coast has seen up to 90% fewer visitors than in 2024. According to the Italian Seaside Resorts Union, visitors have dropped by 20% on average and up to 30% in regions such as Calabria and Emilia. The latter, a traditional destination for family beach tourism, and pasta in the oven, has seen empty beaches especially from Monday to Friday, while those who can afford it take advantage of the weekend—alone—to take a dip in the sea.

"Actually, June wasn't that bad, but July did see a decline," says Simone Battistoni, president of the Italian Seaside Resorts Union in the Emilia-Romagna region. Battistoni acknowledges that this is an irregular phenomenon, more limited to towns that usually hang full signs, such as Rimini, but warns that the worrying thing is the change in habits. "If before people came for two weeks, now they only stay for a week or just for the weekend."

This is confirmed by Bernabé Bocca, president of Federalberghi, Italy's main trade association for the tourism sector. "This year, Italians have tried to organize shorter vacations, stay in apartments, and cut down on spending in restaurants," he explains.

Analysts believe that what is really in crisis is the Italian tourism model, conditioned by a serious structural problem: the private management of beaches. Half of the coastline is managed, under public concession, by private establishments. A centuries-old tradition and a business on which nearly 7,000 companies across the country depend—many of them family-owned—employing more than 60,000 people.

Inherited concessions

It is also traditional for these concessions to be inherited among family members, because in most cases they have been automatically renewed for decades. In 2006, the European Union demanded that Italy liberalize the market and award licenses through public competition, but it wasn't until 2022 that former Prime Minister Mario Draghi appointed a commission to address the situation, which ultimately came to nothing.

Seaside resorts stretch from north to south of the country, including the islands, and there are options for all tastes and budgets. From simple beach bars to elegant ones. beach clubs with a pool and restaurant, where renting an umbrella and a sunbed can cost over €1,500 a day. On the beaches of the Lazio region—of which Rome is the capital—it's difficult to rent two sunbeds and an umbrella for less than €30 a day. This figure rises to €295 in some trendy Puglia towns. There, the cost of renting a sunbed is on average 17% more expensive than four years ago, according to data from the consumer association Altroconsum.

In some regions, private beaches occupy up to 70% of the available coastline, such as in Liguria and Campania. The most extreme case, however, is Naples, where along 27 kilometers of coastline, there are only 200 meters of free access to the sea. That's not even counting Sicily, where the managers of Mondello beach in the capital, Palermo, decided to install turnstiles to prevent anyone from sneaking in.

Despite being a debate that recurs every year, this summer it seems that Italians have had their say, fueled by complaints on social media from numerous well-known faces and viral videos from a young politician. Matteo Hallissey, a 22-year-old from Bolognese who is the president of +Europa, has toured the seaside resorts along the Italian coast during the summer to claim that the beach belongs to everyone.

His modus operandi It's simple: he shows up at beach bars with an umbrella, challenging the definition of a "private beach," and documents everything with a camera. His videos have racked up millions of views.

"For every hundred euros of revenue, beach resorts pay one to the state," he complained in an interview with La Repubblica. Hallissey proposes implementing the European directive that imposes competition in the services sector. "It's true that in Italy we have very few free beaches and that beaches are managed by inheritance, but there are beaches abroad too. The difference is that we're the only ones who don't bid."