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Published: August 10th 2023
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Today we travel a hundred or so kilometres south-east to the town of Rimini on Italy’s Adriatic Coast.
Rentable apartments seemed to be in short supply when we booked, so we’re staying at a beachfront hotel. There wasn’t any shortage of those … seemingly hundreds to choose from. We emerge onto our top floor terrace to see … well that would be an endless sea of beach umbrellas and sunlounges packed onto an also seemingly endless stretch of sand, with scarcely a gap between them for as far as we can see in both directions. If this isn’t home to the world’s largest beach umbrella/sunlounge population I’d like to know what is. They say you can see the Great Barrier Reef from outer space. I don’t remember reading anything similar about the Great Rimini Sunlounge and Beach Umbrella Agglomeration, but I’m sure that’s only because some things are so obvious that no one bothers to write about them.
We read that Rimini is on the Romagna Riviera, and was perhaps unsurprisingly the site of Italy’s first ever “bathing establishment”; that was set up here way back in 1843. I’m not entirely sure what a “bathing establishment” is (at home
we just put our towels on the sand and dive into the surf), but my guess would be that it’s probably got something to do with …. sunlounges and beach umbrellas. There are apparently more than 150 beaches here along 15 uninterrupted kilometres of sand. (If it’s that uninterrupted, and it certainly seems to be, I’m not quite sure why that isn’t just one beach, but who am I to argue with 180 odd years of Italian tradition.) The beach (or beaches?) is divided up into “bagnos” which according to Mr Google are bathrooms, except in this case it seems to refer to groups of, what else, sunlounges and beach umbrellas. The bagnos are all numbered, starting from 1 at the north end up to 151. The numbering then starts again at a small stream, the Torrente Marano (I think "torrent" might be overstating the case just a tad); this time the numbering’s in reverse, from 136 back to 1 again at the south end. Some of the bagnos also have sub-numbers, like 124A in the northern section. A quick peek at Google Maps seems to suggest that there are something of the order of 100 sunlounge/beach umbrella pairings on
average in each bagno, so if there are two sunlounges per umbrella, a bit of quick maths suggests that that would be capacity for more than 50,000 people to get comfortable on the sand here at any one time. Fifty thousand! That’s insane! And no wonder we didn’t have too much trouble finding a hotel … there are apparently more than a thousand of them here, all lined up in rows along the back of the beach. The town’s permanent population’s only around 150,000, so that’s one hotel for every 150 people, and one sunlounge for every three people, so I guess as long as they don’t all decide to go to the beach at once ….
We head down onto the sand in search of lunch, to Bagno 28, full name Bagno 28 Otello. It’s got a restaurant, a volleyball court, bathrooms, indoor and outdoor showers, changing rooms, a dog beach, free safety deposit boxes, free wifi, a “rescue and child loss service”, a beach bar, a gay/lgbt beach bar …. and sunlounges and beach umbrellas. It‘s also got its own website, as seemingly do all the other 286 bagnos … well no it’s actually more than that
… the sub-numbered bagnos have their own websites too. So it seems that we’ve just had lunch at a place that roughly translates to "Bathroom Number 28". I‘m starting to feel like we’ve just landed on another planet.
The sun goes down and the whole place goes up another notch. As we head out for dinner, the streets are packed - restaurants and bars bursting at the seams, and the music’s blaring. We might as well really be on another planet after Bologna’s cultured elegance … did we really just leave there this morning?
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Dancing Dave
David Hooper
Bagno 28
What an insane blog...zillions of neatly lined beach umbrellas...what an insane picture of sardine beach! Insane is an understatement. That's not a resort...that's a George Orwell 1984 canning factory!!!