#Italy has a long-standing issue with private ownership of beaches.
In some locations, up to 80-90% of the beaches are privately owned.
If you want to go to the seaside, you pay a fee to the owner of the facility (“lido”) and then you can access the beach.
When the phenomenon started, the Italian State used to assign licenses to develop seaside facilities to private owners, who were in turn allowed to charge people for the access to the sea in order to fund further development.
Slowly, the lack of regulation and the lobbying from a newly born wealthy class caused the situation to escalate.
Licenses turned into de facto lifetime concessions.
They could be sold by the owner to someone else, like a regular real estate asset, as if the owner had actually originally paid someone to own a public beach.
Predicably, “lido” owners soon started creating their own cartels and synchronized price hikes.
Lobbying slowly caused a large share of the Italian beaches to become private, with unaccountable owners who could extract as much revenue as they liked from anyone who just wanted to enjoy the sea on a warm day.
The issue is well-known and the national government has been trying to address it for years, failing every time because the interests of a tiny lobby (with some of them who also became MPs or government members in the meantime) apparently can win over the interests of millions.
Josi Della Ragione, the young mayor of #Bacoli, a seaside village near Naples where access to nearly 90% of the beaches is behind a fee, has taken the battle on a personal level, and soon most beach owners in the locality may see their licenses revoked and most of the beach become public again.
The clash between the mayor and the private owners has also highlighted the selfishness and detachment from the world of any class of “new riches”.
Infamously, the owner of one of the largest “lido” remarked that the mayor “loves penniless people”. Something that you could have imagined Marie Antoinette say before her head was chopped off.
As if the right for locals to access a public beach was to be awarded only to wealthy individuals happy to part with their money whenever they want to take their children to the sea, and everyone else could either go to overcrowded tiny beaches with free access, or stay at home.
Beaches, parks, water, railways, the IT infrastructure itself, are all crucial components of a healthy State, funded by taxpayers, and fair access to them should hence be granted to all of its citizens without barriers.
Private leasing can be temporarily granted through time-bound licenses, with clear expectations about how the beneficiary can enhance the public resource for the public good in a way that taxpayers alone can’t do.
But those must be leasing licenses - not ownership licenses.
Their time and scope must be limited - at no point those licenses should result in most of the resources being privately owned and in new permanent access barriers being created for the majority of the citizens, who should not be asked to pay twice for the same thing.
And those licenses cannot be extended nor sold, for the same reason why sub-leasing publicly awarded licenses is usually illegal.
Without these constraints, capitalism always predictably degenerates towards the establishment of new unaccountable oligarchies.
Without these constraints, new unaccountable wealthy classes increasingly detached from reality will keep popping up.
https://www.rainews.it/articoli/2026/07/il-sindaco-risponde-al-gestore-del-lido-che-lo-accusa-di-amare-i-pezzenti-si-spiaggia-libera-f1a14c73-5849-4871-b3d8-ed902536c054.html
