A recent strike by beach operators prompted ridicule in Italy, where they are widely seen as a protected group that lives off rents from public land. Their lobbying power reflects not just Italy’s reliance on tourism but the narrow interests it benefits.
People sunbathe and swim at the beach of Monterosso in the Cinque Terre National Park, near La Spezia, Italy, on August 13, 2024. (Marco Bertorello / AFP via Getty Images)
One sweltering hot morning in early August, Italian beach operators organized a two-hour “strike.” The demand: a pathetic attempt to reassert their generational right to occupy public coasts well past their due date.
Italian law dictates that the concessions allowing them to monetize the coastline can last up to twelve years. The reality is that they can last some decades longer. The strike owed to proprietors’ fears that premier Giorgia Meloni would finally give in to European and Italian antitrust authorities, which have for years been calling for new tenders and renewed access to public land. But the worries were overblown: the Italian government and the EU eventually agreed to extend the current concessions up to 2027 (making them as long as two decades).
These rentiers’ position offers a striking example of how tourism is oftentimes an economy benefiting a happy few. The concessionaires generate profit from their passive, de facto ownership of a public good, making it inaccessible to locals in exchange for low-income low-skilled jobs. This also offers a poor tax take, as beach operators often pay very little to the state for the occupation of public land.
Given the beach operators’ well-known privileges — and prices reaching €100 a day in some locations — their complaints were met with mostly amused responses. The strike stopped people from making it to the beach as late as 9:30 a.m. — but who hits the sand so early anyway? Activists from the Partito Radicale promoting free beach access surely caused more disruption by taking over beach clubs with their parasols, asserting the constitutional right to the land.
But beach operators have allies in high places. This government’s other stances helping out the business include refusing a minimum wage and shielding Airbnb and similar platforms from restrictions. It even denied support to city councils that did try to impose a limit on new tourist rentals, practically condemning such moves to failure. It instead promoted a national code to survey short-term rentals for fiscal reasons and to curb illegal tourist rentals, though critics argue that this won’t stop the current hijacking of the housing market by tourism. It’s part of a catalog of stances serving the interests of the tourism sector — or rather, those who profit from it.
Defending the Happy Few
Still, it’s also clear that beach operators have enjoyed a (nearly) inexplicable favoritism from all recent Italian governments. They have escaped any revision of their concessions for some fifteen years, while benefitting for generations from illegal, Mob-like ownership of public beaches. They are also well-represented in the Meloni government, as Minister of Tourism Daniela Santanchè is herself a former beach club owner.
Soon after taking office in 2022, Meloni’s right-wing coalition postponed the call for tenders up to December 2024. The decree was soon ruled unlawful by the Council of State. But with the new decision to extend concessions, and a call for tenders not past 2028, the government might escape a pending — and expensive — EU infringement procedure for defying the EU’s free-market laws, known as the Bolkestein directive.
The beach operators dispute shows that government support for the tourist sector is not popular. According to polls, 49 percent of Italians favor measures limiting tourism tout court, against 38 percent opposed. It is not as if most Italians benefit: most of them can no longer afford a vacation even in Italy itself, while the number of foreign tourists is rising, and tourism is contributing to increased rent and housing prices in most cities.
Notwithstanding its rhetoric, the government has not practically addressed the consequences of overtourism. Instead, the recent G7 summit in the Southern Italian region of Apulia was a sign of Meloni’s vision of the future: a Disneyland-like haven for luxury mass tourism where other sectors of the economy have died out.
Meloni hosted the world leaders in Borgo Egnazia, a five-star holiday resort opened in 2010 and built to resemble a traditional Apulian village, with white stone houses, olive tree gardens, and cobblestone piazzas. Ironically, the resort was authorized by a left-wing local government. In a vitriolic satire, Italian writer Michele Masneri described Borgo Egnazia as straight out of a fantasy book. “You had the lady hand-making orecchiette, the Taranta,” Meloni told the press, citing a traditional pasta and dance in order to feed a tourist cliché.
However, Apulia’s economy has not always lived off tourism. The area suffers from the dying steel industry in Taranto — and the pollution it left — and from the combined effects of the devastating Xylella, a virus that has almost halved the production of olive oil in fifteen years, as well as climate-change-induced droughts impacting the remaining agriculture. The ruling coalition takes pride in the current state of the economy, but only tourism seems to be flourishing.
The Merchants of Venice
In a way, what is happening to Italy already happened to Venice — a kind of unplanned sociological experiment for the feasibility of overtourism. Today the number of Venetians inhabiting the lagoon has fallen under the psychological threshold of fifty thousand — the center can accommodate three times that sum — as ever more people choose to rent out Airbnbs and move to the inland urban area of Mestre. As residents leave, nonresidents party. In 2023, the city hosted over thirteen million tourists, almost equaling the pre-pandemic record. A recent experiment to make visitors buy an entry ticket to curb crowds was concluded last July, amid protests from locals accusing the mayor, Luigi Brugnaro — considered a local version of the late Silvio Berlusconi — of treating Venice like Disneyland.
Venetians have dealt with tourists for centuries without excesses. The roots of today’s imbalance — turning Venice into an overtourism Disneyland — are more recent and, according to a Venetian scholar, can be traced back to fascism. Clara Zanardi, a Venetian urban anthropologist, has reconstructed how the depopulation of the city was engineered under the watch of the Fascist regime’s industry and finance minister Giuseppe Volpi in the 1930s.
“I asked myself why all these people went away together, in the same period, over fifty years, and to the same place, and what struck me was to find that it was planned, and how much the project was made explicit,” Zanardi says.
Volpi and other industrialists — the so-called “Venetian group” — championed the expulsion of the working classes from the lagoon, as the most densely populated parts of the city were at the time crowded and derelict. “The idea was that of a new Venice, they called it the Great Venice, but the city at the beginning of the twentieth century was amongst the poorest in Italy,” Zanardi says.
Instead of intervening to help them, the government and the industrialists of the time decided to promote the displacement of Venetians to the mainland, as the expanding petrochemical hub of Porto Marghera, a few miles from the centuries-old city, needed cheap labor.
Zanardi notes that politicians like entrepreneur Vittorio Cini even called this “the human remediation,” or “la bonifica umana,” believing that purging Venice of its low-income families would grant the city the chance to restore its historical heritage and make room for the ruling class. At the time, the Fascist regime was conducting remediations (“bonifiche”) of swampy areas of Italy where malaria was still endemic, including in territories near Rome. “Bonifiche” was a buzzword — in Venice’s case, applied to citizens themselves.
This philosophy outlasted fascism and persisted for decades, Zanardi explains. However, a new player had entered the scene: tourism. By the 1970s, the industrial promise of Porto Marghera had started to fade, leaving an ecological disaster that few visitors are aware of and a good chunk of Venetians displaced out of the lagoon. With only one possible source of income, more and more Venetians embraced tourism. Zanardi promotes research on the topic through the publishing house Wetlands, which she cofounded.
“In a way, the project of a purified Venice is a success. But it failed in shaping the city for the elites, as even that function was eaten by tourism, which with its income rates killed any other visions for the city starting from the 1970s,” explains Zanardi.
Today’s Venetians are the cause of their own harm. Very few neither work in the sector nor rent property to tourists, which makes saving the lagoon from depopulation even more difficult. It is a death loop: the increasing presence of tourists makes the price of goods and rents skyrocket, which pushes out locals, which bankrupts shops and services, which leads to even more locals moving out. Then, only Disneyland remains.
The Right to a Home
Ultimately, the fight against overtourism is about the right of ordinary people, including immigrants, to live in a place that was once their own, or that once welcomed everybody. Giacomo Salerno, a Venetian and researcher at the University of Siena and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, knows this pretty well.
The Ca’ Foscari researcher, a colleague of Zanardi, is also a member of Ocio, a collective that advocates for affordable living in the lagoon. Last year, Ocio pushed the ATA (High Residential Tension) draft bill to tightly regulate Airbnb and similar platforms and curb their impact on the renting and housing market — something Italy has never done. Though receiving attention from center-left city councils and parties, including the opposition Partito Democratico, the Meloni government has thus far ignored the proposal.
“That’s the specificity of this government, that of representing the other interests at play,” Salerno says. He points out the proposals of Tourism Minister Santanchè. A member of Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party, Santanchè has repeatedly taken the side of more investments in luxury tourism, including revamping the airport at the luxury winter resort town of Cortina, as it is “an ordeal” to get there, she told the press, citing her own experience. She also promised to bring tourists to the mountain resort location of Cogne by helicopter after a flood isolated the area. The minister believes luxury can be a good source of widespread wealth.
In truth, in doing so, Santanchè, who was once a member of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party, is only following his legacy. In 2009, during his last spell as prime minister, Berlusconi reinstated the Ministry of Tourism, after a 1993 referendum had dissolved it.
Conservative mayor Brugnaro’s office in Venice shares the national government’s focus on luxury. His tourism councilor, Simone Venturini, said in July that the city was still “too affordable” and should be made more expensive ahead of the 2025 Jubilee.
“You do indeed have some Venetian bourgeois whining about uncivil tourists but then living off tourist rentals, but they are a minority,” researcher Salerno says. He believes that the control of the tourism sector today is moving well outside the reach of the middle class into the hands of a few tycoons and platforms, most of whom are based abroad.
“The narrative of tourism as the fuel of the Italian economy has become this country’s industrial policy,” Salerno says, “a nation choosing to stop investing in innovation and instead focusing on an economy as poor as that of tourism.” Salerno calls this a “colonial economy.”
As it often happens, the Left has its share of responsibility in this, as even the same definition of tourism as the country’s petrol belongs to Gianni De Michelis, who said it in 1986, when he served as minister of labor under the second Socialist government of Bettino Craxi.
The Lagoon of Overtourism
Today Italy feels like Venice at the beginning of the 2000s. It is already experiencing the drastic consequences of overtourism, but politicians — as well as citizens — are still defending its profits and being delusional about its effects. Last summer, Fratelli d’Italia minister of business and made in Italy Adolfo Urso falsely asserted that tourism was “pulling the economy forward,” when in fact, it amounts to roughly 8 percent of Italian GDP.
“Now even the self-representation of Italian nationalism is that of a country precisely devoted to selling the Italian way of life to tourists,” Salerno says. The recent G7 summit in Apulia proves it.
Tourism does not seem to have brought much wealth in these areas, even though its profits are growing. In fact, Southern Italy is facing a demographic winter worse than in the North, with projections forecasting the loss of eight million citizens by 2080, mostly from northward immigration, alongside a climate change–induced desertification that sees Sicily suffering the most. The increasing tourist demand is not sustaining any project to save the future of these regions.
“The point is that tourism is not a zero-impact economy as it was once believed — it is a heavy industry with serious effects on the territories, as its raw materials are in fact the territories,” Salerno says.
Overtourism may succeed in consuming Venice before climate change. But if Venice is sinking, Italy is certainly not floating any better. It might even be next.