Tuscany’s Empty Umbrellas and the Price of Shade

It’s one of the recurring images in Italian media this summer: long rows of empty umbrellas along the Tuscan coast, from chic Forte dei Marmi to laid-back San Vincenzo, and more generally from beaches across Italy.

They stand proudly like monuments to high prices, with a day’s rental now costing more than a week’s groceries — or, in some cases, as much as a second-hand scooter or even a new car, when rented together with a hotel room, a house or a villa.

We used to call them stabilimenti balneari, places where Italian families spent August with sand between their toes and sandwiches in the cooler.

Now they’re luxury lounges — some genuinely so, others merely posing as such — waiting for international “billionaires” to descend from their yachts… and they’re still waiting.

All this happens on public land, leased from the state for sums so small they could fit in a beach bag. The 2006 EU Bolkestein directive, which called for public tenders for beach concessions, remains unenforced in this sector.

The Italian government is formally preparing the public tenders required under EU rules, a process that has been on the agenda for years. In reality, it is buying time — as every administration has done over the past two decades — delaying a full overhaul of the system.

Maybe it’s time to go further and “free” our beaches from the sunbed-industrial complex — so the next time we see an empty umbrella, it’s because someone went for a swim, not because they couldn’t afford the shade.

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