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.