ROME - British actor Rupert Everett has become the figurehead of a campaign to free Italy's beaches from the clutches of bathing businesses.
Any summer visitor to the Italian coast is familiar with the long broad curve of blond beach covered by beach umbrellas and sun loungers intight, neat ranks.
They are owned by companies which rent them to bathers and often charge a fee to people who merely want to swim.
Last week when Everett arrived in Venice for the international film festival, and went to take a dip in the sea, he was informed he could not swim without paying for admission.
"Access to the sea should be guaranteed to everybody," he told Italian television. "I want to take the Venetian authorities to court."
The actor's indignation has struck a chord in Italy, where 2007 has been a summer of discontent for bathers.
Huge stretches of Italy's 2420km swimmablecoast are in the hands of concessionaires who provide food, drink, showers, paddling pools, umbrellas and loungers to holidaymakers.
They dominate the most popular and beautiful parts of the coast.
In Liguria, on the northwest coast, of 135 swimmable kilometres of beach, only 19km are free.
But the concessionaires are only the tenants of their stretch of sand, the state remains the owner.
A new law appended to the budget bill allows Everett, and anyone else with a pair of trunks, to swim free. "It is obligatory for the holders of concessions to permit unhampered and free access to, and transit to and from, the shoreline facing the concession, up to the end of the shoreline."
According to consumer organisation Adiconsum, the shoreline comprises the area 5m from "where the waves arrive".
"This strip of sand," Adiconsum says, "is for the use of everybody. It is excluded from the concession. So the concessionary cannot claim any right over it".
