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As Italy slips into early summer, business is booming at Gabriele Di Sienna’s family-owned restaurant, which serves Spanish food — and provides umbrellas, sunbeds and changing cabins — to visitors to Ostia beach outside Rome.
But after two tough years of Covid-19, Di Sienna, 45, sees little to cheer. Like other owners of the ubiquitous balneari or bathing establishments that line Italy’s coasts, he has big new worries about his business’s long-term future, as Italy plans a shake-up of its traditional beach management.
To resolve a seemingly frivolous but intense and long-running quarrel between Rome and Brussels over beaches, Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s government has agreed to terminate all Italy’s beach concessions next year and hold auctions for new ones.
The tenders aim to redress EU complaints about a lack of transparency in the allotment of lucrative beach rights, ensure fair competition to manage prime beaches and give Italy’s cash-strapped government more of the revenues generated from the private use of the public coastline.
Yet Di Sienna and his two cousins — the third generation to run a business founded by their grandfather in 1964 — fear they will lose the enterprise that has sustained them all their lives.
“It’s something like losing a child or losing a son,” Di Sienna said. “This concession was for life, and now everything has changed. Big firms will come and put their hands on everything. A family like ours doesn’t have a lot of money. Multinationals have a lot of money to buy everything.”
Italy’s estimated 30,000 private bathing concessions — which range from humble beach shacks to luxurious resorts — occupy nearly 60 per cent of the coastline each summer with their umbrellas and loungers. Many of the businesses are decades old, some passed from generation to generation within families, and others traded between unrelated parties like any financial asset.
Marina Lalli, president of the Association of Tourism Entrepreneurs, says the businesses are integral to the Italian beach scene economy.
“The tradition in Italy among tourists is that people like to have the beach already set up for them,” said Lalli, who has a 70-room seafront hotel with 500 sunbeds, and 189 large umbrellas, in southern Italy. “There are people who like to go with their own umbrella, but it’s a minority.”
“This is our tradition, our economy, our tourists,” she added. “We don’t see why we should change this way of life.”
Yet Italy’s beach concessions have attracted controversy. Legambiente, a national environmental movement, argues the businesses prevent free public access to a precious natural environment and have in effect privatised public beaches — and worsened coastal erosion — while giving public coffers little in return.
Establishments that can generate millions in annual revenues — charging as much as €100 a day for a lounger in a prime location in peak summer — may pay just a few thousand euros a year in fees to government.
According to the EU, the enterprises also violate Italy’s obligation to ensure that concessions to manage scarce natural resources are granted for a “limited duration, and through an open public selection procedure, based on non-discriminatory, transparent and objective criteria”.
With considerable political clout both in their communities and parliament, bathing establishment owners have long resisted Brussels’ calls for greater private competition for Italy’s prime beaches.
In July 2020, with tourism in the pandemic doldrums, the previous Italian government even voted to extend all beach concessions for another 13 years until 2033. That prompted the European Commission to launch formal infringement proceedings against Rome, while Italy’s own Council of State ruled such a long extension was also illegal.
Draghi now hopes to settle the beach concession issue as part of a wider reform effort to reboot Italy’s economy and boost growth. But it has not been easy, given the support for the balneari among many Italian lawmakers. The auctions have been tacked on to a broader competition law that Italy must adopt this year to fulfil conditions of its €200mn EU-funded Covid recovery plan.
Despite the unease along the coasts, Italian officials said they did not expect the wholesale eviction of all incumbent concessionaires, as the auctions will take account of families that depend on beach businesses as their sole income source, as well as large recent investments.
But officials said the tender would also establish a principle that concessions were not automatic, indefinite entitlements and must be earned. To shore up political support from members of his own national unity government, Draghi’s administration has agreed to compensate owners who lose their concessions — though the precise formula for valuing the businesses has yet to be worked out.
Even with these safeguards, many owners remain gloomy, warning of an end to the distinctive character of Italy’s seaside and the prospect of large, global hotel chains — with their generic character — moving in to displace local owners.
“It will be the globalisation of the beaches,” said Lalli. “They will take away the specificity of Italian tourism and Italian hospitality.”
Back at Ostia, Di Sienna is anxiously awaiting details of the bidding process, which he said would probably determine whether he got to retain the business built by his family over decades.
“There is a very big risk that we are going to lose everything,” he said. “From one day to the next, our family will be without work.”
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