ROME LETTER:Italians spend so much time on the beach they expect it to have every possible home comfort.
THE OTHER morning, your correspondent was down at our Trevignano beach, changing his togs and getting into his regulation Irish Timesforeign cor dinner jacket (he was about to hit the old PC keyboard so Lord Reith dress was obligatory), when he noticed an informative little scene.
Another beachgoer beside me, a middle-aged Roman woman out on a day trip, was looking for a toilet. To her delight, she noticed that right down at the end of our beach, there were two portable toilets. Her delight soon turned into disgust when she tried to use the said amenities. They were filthy and viciously smelly.
"What a disgusting little village," pronounced the woman when she gave up on the idea. Of course, I should have warned her. The portable toilets had been brought in a week earlier for a lakeside "beer festival" and left there stinking and wretched ever since.
You see, the point about our beach is that the "commune" (local authority) has never had the gumption to provide something as basic as lakeside loos. If you are a day-tripper (and thousands of Romans visit Trevignano every weekend throughout the year), then you have to walk back up into the town to find either a public loo (not particularly pleasant) or one in a cafe or restaurant.
I have been thinking this summer that if stuffy old Karl Marx had abandoned the British Library and instead taken a good look at our beach, he might have concluded that the game was up. State ownership could never work; private enterprise is your only man. In a sense, there is much to be learned from urinals and the state of them. Or put another way, if you want a clean, well-run bit of beach complete with a loo, do not look to the state to provide, at least in Italy.
This is the time of year when all Italian thoughts turn to the beach. So much so that, according to a recent survey, three out of four Italians feel a tad intimidated about strutting their stuff on the beach - apparently they feel that they run the risk of a brutta figurabecause they have not done enough to get the little old paunch under control.
The idea of a privately-owned or privately-run bit of beach is simply anathema to many. Why should we pay someone to enjoy the bounties of God's creation? The answer, of course, has much to with the wildly different ways in which Northern European and Mediterranean man experience the beach. Deprived, as he is, of a real summer, Northern European man tends to see the beach as an extended walking ground, to be attacked complete with jackets, scarves and boots on the odd windy afternoon.
For Mediterranean man, though, it is a whole other, season-long, ball game. Not only does he require a deck chair for maybe two months, but he also wants it to come complete with a nearby cafe, restaurant, toilet, entertainments officer and, these days, a seafront Wi-Fi signal.
And it is in that context that our old pals, Manuela and Dado, have been doing a roaring trade in Trevignano in these crisis-ridden times of reduced disposable income. We have a very dark, rough and pebbly beach (the Lago di Bracciano is an old volcanic lake) that gathers no small amount of rubbish from one end of the day to the next. The commune's solution to this problem is to travel up and down the beach with a tractor-pulled, giant rake that basically churns everything up and then churns it down again in an operation that puts a sort of clean face on everything.
It is here that private enterprise comes into play. Two years ago, Manuela and Dado, who live right on the beach, petitioned the commune for the right to run their own stabilimentoor beach front. Where the commune falls short, they bridge the gap. The local authority has not bothered to provide toilets on the beach - no problem, Manuela has provided by building a whole new public bathroom complex in one corner of her garden.
The beach is only relatively clean? No problem, the pair of them are out on their patch at 7.30 in the morning, raking it by hand and removing offending items such as cigarette butts, dead foliage, sweet papers, plastic bags, etc. The beach is very hot and dry? Again, no problem; since last winter Dado, a retired manual labourer, created a whole new lawn area of cool green grass where a client can stretch out and read his Gazzetta Dello Sportin peace. Better still, if you are feeling thirsty, Manuela has a little (soft) drinks bar in another corner of the garden.
All of this might seem immensely obvious but, given that the local authority has made little or no effort to develop the resource (the lake is sparklingly clean and enticing), Manuela has stepped in and found herself packed out every weekend with Roman day-trippers and tourists only too glad to pay not just for the deck chair but for the range of ancillary services.
It is some sort of "sign of the times" too that where once Dado cultivated a huge orto(vegetable garden), he has now reduced it in size, converting part of it into a car park for his clients.
Whereas once he would have been planting rows of lettuce and tomatoes in lines of military precision, he now sets out the deck chairs with equal precision. (Mind you, he still grows a modest amount of greens for home use).
The best aspect of Manuela and Dado's enterprise, however, is that they have raised the bar considerably for the whole beach. Rival stabilimentiare working hard to keep up with them and, in the process, making the whole beach look cleaner and more attractive. Could it be that the profit motive has actually done a major service for the collective, environmental good? That's not really what old Karl predicted back in the British Library, is it?