At 1 p.m. at the San Girolamo beach in Italy’s southern city of Bari, as the sun reached its summit and temperatures came close to 100 degrees, the smell of fried green peppers made its way through a thick maze of umbrellas and folding chairs.
On plastic tables, decks of playing cards and crossword puzzles were replaced by cotton tablecloths, and loud shouts summoned the children for lunch. Aluminium trays of lasagna, rice with mussels and potatoes, seafood pasta, raw octopus and fried sausages were all served, as part of a longstanding Italian tradition of feasting on the beach.
“When it’s too hot we make vegetables,” said Grazia De Giosa, 61, who had prepared a three-course meal for her extended family. “Like parmigiana.”
But over the last couple of summers, the beloved ritual has become a source of tension. Locals have noticed that a growing number of beach clubs on the Apulian coast around Bari, a stronghold of seaside picnics, have started banning people from coming in with food.
“On a private beach, it’s not nice to see these banquets,” said Erika Scarimbolo, 23, a bar waitress at the Adria 3.0 beach club in San Girolamo, one of many businesses that have sprung up in recent years with the region’s booming tourism trade. “An owner sometimes needs a little decorum.”
In a country where for many people, lunch and the beach are the summer’s often inextricable protagonists, the new directives caused a stir. Local newspapers scrupulously reported the clashes at the beach clubs’ gates. “Apulia: the Beach-Picnic ‘War’,” read a headline in Italy’s largest newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera. Dozens of articles tried to answer the question of whether it was legal to bar people from bringing their cooking to the beach. Lawyers, and even politicians, weighed in.
By law, no one can bar Italians from bringing their own food to beaches — which are all public, while resorts only provide a service on them. But because the clubs operate under such a peculiar legal arrangement, some owners have taken to enforcing what are generally the unwritten rules about eating out, which include not bringing your own food.
But some Apulian working families who feel priced out of their increasingly popular, privatized and expensive beaches, the rules were seen as yet another barrier.
On Bari’s beaches, as they passed around frosted Peroni bottles constantly emerging from coolers, Apulians angrily discussed the new bans. Their gazebos and luncheons, they said, felt like the last bastion of good spirits in a region many now struggle to recognize.
“It’s illegal what they do, putting their hands into people’s bags,” said Michele Scorca, after eating a meal of roasted chicken and potatoes by the water.
“In order not to get into fights, we come here,” he said of the San Girolamo beach, a narrow stretch of sand overlooked by apartment buildings that has remained public, or a “free beach,” as Italians put it.
The number of beach clubs in Apulia has increased by 50 percent in the past decade or so, foreign tourism has more than doubled, and parts of the coast have become virtually inaccessible to working families.
The lunch on the beach “is all we have left,” said Paolo De Tullio, 67, as his family debated whether it would rain on the following day, and whether they would eat baked bucatini. “Coming here is our right,” he said.
The sentiment was shared across the deck chairs.
“Apulia is not ours anymore,” said Giovanni Paccione, who had just finished a feast of fried shrimp, seafood spaghetti and roasted peppers with tuna, garlic and parsley.
He reminisced about the time when the beaches in Savelletri, now home to the luxury resort that hosted the Group of 7 summit in June, were open for everyone to enjoy and overeat.
“Now they bought everything,” he said.
Francesco Telegrafo, an owner of the Adria 3.0 beach club, said that he understood that “it’s deep-rooted in our blood to take half of our home to the beach,” and that he kept the prices low to accommodate the needs of local families. But, he added, “You just need to do it with measure.”
A few meters away, at the public beach, measure was not on the menu.
The Stasi family had come with several tents, a dozen pans, portable stoves, buckets overflowing with chopped tomatoes, two-liter bottles filled with olive oil, and a raft of coolers.
“We make sure nothing is missing,” Caterina Catacchio said as she ate a plate of rice salad while pasta water, ready for fresh cavatelli, simmered nearby. Trays of salami, octopus salad and panzerotti circulated among the friends and family members. “She brought her whole fridge from home,” Ms. Catacchio said, gesturing to a friend.
The word “fagottari” — roughly translated as “bundle-bearers” — has been used to describe Italians bringing their own food to the beach since the 1950s, when seaside mass tourism exploded after World War II, and factory workers finally took to the beaches for their summer vacations. Black-and-white movies show Italians eating pasta on the porch of their cabins, or shlepping gigantic watermelons on the bus to the beach.
Over time, the habit has become less prevalent, with many Italians buying sandwiches or snacking at bars. But according to an August survey by Coldiretti, Italy’s biggest farmers’ association, rising prices have pushed a growing number of Apulians to return to bringing their own lunch to the beach.
While most prefer rice or pasta salads, according to the poll, more than 20 percent of the population still favors lasagna, eggplant Parmesan, meatballs or frittata.
In Bari, some even prepared roasted ciole, or horse offal.
Many of the women had gotten up between 4 and 6 a.m. to cook, making the traditional rice with lentils, stuffed cuttlefish or the cialda, a salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes and red Acquaviva onion.
Families gathered, from great-great grandmothers to weeks-old babies. They tendered slices of rice frittata to the African sellers working on the beach, and sat together for hours in an endless stream of jokes and focaccias.
“When the summer starts, I look like this,” said Luigi Lotriglio, 67, showing his pinkie. “At the end of the summer I look like this,” he said, pointing at his round belly.
“We don’t give a damn about our figure,” said Ramona Reda, 35, sitting by a plate of deep-fried fish.
“In case we feel sick, she works at the emergency room,” said Isabella Stella, 27, referring to a relative who was entering the water for a post-Parm dip.
Antonio Rovero, a refrigeration technician, looked over a trays of rolls of pork stuffed with cheese, and prepared for an inevitable afternoon nap.
He had just finished eating baked pasta with meatballs, which he said his wife had covered in a layer of eggplant Parmesan. “Otherwise,” he said, “it has no taste.”
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Read More: Italians Fight for the Right to Feast on the Beach
