It’s been billed as the Sisters of Charity versus the mayor.
For 80 years or more, the Sisters of Charity of Saint Mary have occupied a small slice of terrestrial paradise, running one of thousands of beach clubs along Italy’s coast.
But this longtime arrangement in Spotorno, an Italian town on the Ligurian Sea, may soon come to an end. The nuns’ beach, like all the Italian coastline, is publicly owned, and local officials say their lease will soon be put up for auction, along with those of other beachfront clubs.
Some Spotorno residents are unhappy about it, saying that the nuns had supported the community for many years. Italian news outlets have picked up the story, several of them using variations on “Holy War” in their headlines.
But Mayor Mattia Fiorini says he is simply trying to enforce regional and European Union laws that have been ignored for two decades.
“Every Italian story seems a soap opera,” he said, adding, “We have a knack for coming up with 1,000 laws a day and, apparently, failing to enforce even a single one.”
On a sandy stretch of beach, the nuns run a summer camp for children and rent umbrellas and lounge chairs to beachgoers.
Some families in Spotorno have sent their children to the summer camp for generations. While the nuns don’t set up the beachgoers’ umbrellas — that task is left to a lifeguard — they do “pass among them asking people how they are,” and bringing “words of comfort,” said Valeria Arzenton, a local resident.
The nuns’ strip of sand, 50 meters wide and running from the villa to the sea, is one of more than 7,000 like it on the Italian coastline, leased to private clubs, most of which are family-run. The clubs generally don’t charge admission per se, but they require beachgoers to rent a lounge chair, usually with an umbrella.
In 2006, the European Union passed a law prohibiting the automatic renewal of leases for public assets like beaches, requiring that open auctions be held instead. Italy’s beachfront clubs have denounced the law ever since, and it has gone mostly unenforced on the Italian coastline.
Now, though, Italy’s government has told municipalities that they must start putting the beach leases up for auction by next year. That means the Spotorno scuffle is likely to be replayed in dozens of cities along the coast in the coming months.
Critics of the clubs say they have co-opted a public good — public access to Italy’s beaches is supposed to be guaranteed — while creating an increasingly expensive monopoly.
Roberto Biagini, a member of Mare Libero (Free Sea), an association lobbying to reduce the number of clubs, said that a few thousand club owners had been holding “60 million Italians hostage.” Officials in Spotorno are merely upholding the law, he said.
Besides the E.U. law, Mr. Fiorini said, he has to comply with a 1999 law passed by the regional government, also widely ignored, that calls for 40 percent of beaches to be free, or partly free. The new license that will go up for auction in front of the nuns’ villa is for a “free equipped beach,” meaning that on one part of the beach, renting a lounge chair or an umbrella will not be required.
Mr. Fiorini said he also hoped the public auction would lead to more investment in Spotorno’s beachfront. He said the town’s services and infrastructures were “stuck in the 1960s,” when Italian families would rent lounge chairs and umbrellas at clubs for an entire season, and the town would live off the tourism. “This system worked, then,” he said.
Club owners have argued that ending their leases would cost jobs, and that they would never be sufficiently compensated for the investments they had put into their facilities. Fabrizio Licordari, the president of Assobalneari Italia, an association of beachfront clubs, said the mayor didn’t “fully grasp the value that the beach clubs represent” to Spotorno’s economy.
Some Spotorno residents argue that the Sisters of Charity of Saint Mary do not run an ordinary beachfront club.
While they do rent beach chairs and umbrellas, their summer camp for children, and a nursery school that they run in the winter, represent “an irreplaceable social service for Spotorno,” said Ms. Arzenton, who said her 6-year old daughter had attended the camp and the nursery school for years. (The Sisters of Charity declined to comment for this article, but they asked Ms. Arzenton to speak on their behalf.)
Another resident, Anna Maria Gottardi, said her twins were the third generation of her family to be cared for by the nuns. She said the beach club’s revenues went to support the facility and the order’s charitable works around the world.
Mr. Fiorini said that made little difference. “I’m not disputing the fact that, in this case, the money is actually sent elsewhere for charitable purposes, but unfortunately that matters little under the law,” he said. “Since they are a beach resort like any other, they must participate in a competitive bidding process.”
