Rising Cost of a Day at the Beach Angers Italians

Every year in Italy, during the sultry weeks straddling Ferragosto — the sacrosanct mid-August national holiday — cities empty as Italians head en masse to beaches and mountain resorts. But this summer, the usual idyll was sullied in the minds of many Italians shocked by how expensive a day at the beach has become.

“I don’t understand why I have to pay 50 euros a day” for a beach umbrella and two lounge chairs, said Michelle Guerra, who was instead sitting on a towel at one of the few free beaches in Santa Marinella, a seaside resort town some 40 miles north of Rome. “Salaries have been frozen for years, but everything has become so much more expensive.”

Stagnant wages have long been a problem in Italy. Most times people grumble and move on, but every so often, the issue sparks a flare of national indignation. This summer, that anger has centered on the cost of an umbrella and two lounge chairs at Italian beach clubs, sapping some of the fun out of the August beach getaways that many Italians consider something of a birthright.

“Beach umbrellas cost their weight in gold and the beaches are emptying,” read one front-page headline in the Turin daily La Stampa. Another headline, in the daily newspaper Libero, blared, “The expensive holidays that ruin Italians’ dreams.”

The coastline in Italy is owned by the state, and public access to beaches is guaranteed. But the state leases portions of the coastline to more than 7,000 mostly-family run beachfront clubs. The clubs charge for use of their facilities, which can include not only chairs and umbrellas, but also showers, changing rooms, parking, and even pools in pricier establishments. Once the summer hits, rows of matching umbrellas dot the beaches, with their colors and patterns changing at irregular intervals to delineate individual beach clubs.

This year, usual prices have ranged from about $24 to well above $117.

For a family, securing a spot on the beach can quickly add up. On the low end, in Rimini on the Adriatic Riviera, a week at a beach club for a family of four can run to around $387 for seats on the rows closest to the water (slightly less in the rows behind), but that doesn’t factor in other vacation costs. A similar setup at a club in Forte dei Marmi, an upscale Tuscan town, can cost at least three times as much. There are countless variations from beach to beach, depending on the club and its amenities.

Associations representing beach clubs say it is unfair to blame them for rising prices; they, too, face increasing costs. They note that beach clubs provide more than umbrellas and chairs, including lifeguards. Their take is not that they are too expensive — but that Italians are too poor, because the cost of living has outpaced salaries.

“The problem is the crisis of the middle class, the crisis of household incomes which should be supported,” said Antonio Capacchione, president of Sindacato Italiano Balneari, a beach club association.

According to the national statistics agency ISTAT, the purchasing power of contractual wages of Italian workers is 9 percent below 2021 levels. Italian salaries lag the European Union average, and Italy remains one of the few EU countries without a minimum wage.

As tempers rose with the temperatures, the price of beach umbrellas suddenly became political.

Consumer groups and opposition politicians pounced on statistics from an association representing beach clubs that showed a notable drop, around 15 percent, in beach attendance in July compared with the same month last year. One such group, Codacons, said the average prices for umbrellas and chairs had jumped by some 33 percent since pre-Covid years, based on their extrapolations from ISTAT statistics.

Consumer groups brandished the numbers as evidence that prices had hit a breaking point for families, while opposition politicians blamed three years of center-right government policies that they say did little to support the working class.

The government shot back with statistics showing that tourism was up by about 7.7 percent over 2024. A representative for the tourism minister, Daniela Santanchè, said the minister declined to discuss the issue since prices were not the her purview.

Gabriele Greco, the chief executive of an online booking platform for beach clubs, said that the drop in beach-going in July was more likely to be meteorological than political. It was a cool, windy month sandwiched between suffocating heat waves in June and August.

And Fabrizio Licordari, the president of Assobalneari Italia, another association of beach clubs, pointed out there were beach clubs to fit every budget. “You don’t see these kinds of polemics when it comes to hotels,” he said, adding that the sustained media attention on prices had made beach clubs the “scapegoat to hide the fact that there is a major crisis in Italian families.”

The going daily rate at the handful of clubs that have colonized the sandiest strip of beach in Santa Marinella is between 45 and 60 euro (about $52 to $70) for an umbrella-chairs combo. The area had a glamorous turn in the 1950s when film stars came to visit Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, who had a villa there, and it remains popular in part because the beach is just a few minutes’ walk from the train station.

Leila Fares, who manages the carefully curated La Perla del Tirreno beach club, said that its proximity to Rome made Santa Marinella “expensive, in every respect,” but that hadn’t put off her clients, who kept coming. The only slow days were when the trains went on strike, she said.

At another beach club in Santa Marinella on a recent sunny day, a no-vacancy sign was posted in four languages.

In some ways, all the arguing is academic. The clubs themselves may be on borrowed time.

A European Union law from 2006 prohibits automatic renewal of contracts for public assets like beach leases, requiring open auctions instead. Ever since, beach club owners have been fighting government efforts to put beach venues up for public tender to anyone in the bloc. They argue that they could never be properly recompensed for the investments they have put into their clubs, in many cases over decades. Not to mention they would lose their jobs, they say.

Italy in particular has been dragging its feet despite repeated rebukes from the EU.

Roberto Biagini, a member of Mare Libero (Free Sea), an association lobbying to have fewer beach clubs, believes that having more free beaches would naturally lead to a drop in prices as remaining clubs, in effect, lost their monopolies.

In Santa Marinella, Maria Cecchelin, visiting on a recent weekday, said she comes often to the beach from her nearby town. She does not rent chairs because it would quickly break her family’s budget.

Instead, she, her husband and a group of friends contented themselves with foldable chairs on a concrete breakwater.

“Prices are absurd now,” she said, before presenting a decidedly sunny view of the situation. The platform where she’d set up her umbrella and chairs was higher than the sandy beach, and a steady breeze cooled the air, though the temperature was well into the 90s. “We like this place a lot,” she said.