Forte dei Marmi, 2024

THE ART OF COMPOSED NONCHALANCE AT FORTE DEI MARMI.

Forte Closes for Winter. What about Our Beach Club Sprezzatura?

Raked to the perfection of a zen garden, the gravel parking lot was covered with bamboo reed shades that let just enough sunlight through to make it look like a giant sheet of squared paper. The plants had been watered, and even though autumn was approaching, there wasn't a single dry leaf around.

There was no trace of Ingegnere Giovanni either.

The door of his office was locked. It was exactly the same as the doors of the two toilets and the three showers next to it. A woman in her fifties with chestnut dyed hair, wearing a white waist apron, held a mop as if she were ordered to stand guard over the six doors. If it hadn't been for the blue plastic nursing clogs and a tattoo above her left ankle, she could have walked straight out of a Roberto Rossellini film.

She looked at us as if we should have known that at 09:30 AM sharp, Ingegnere Giovanni went upstairs to prepare a cup of tea from his stash of first flush Darjeeling leaves that he had been buying online ever since he visited India to research the opening of the first Italian bagno on the beaches of Goa.

It had made perfect sense to him at the time: He'd close his bagno in Forte dei Marmi at the end of the season—late September—open in Goa a couple of weeks later, and double his revenue for the year. It only took the taxi ride from the airport for the Mumbai discombobulation to bombard the rationale of his engineering intellect to the smithereens. The town had swallowed him mercilessly and spit him out a few days later, exhausted, confused, and in unrelenting pursuit of clean restrooms nearby.

He never got to Goa. The bagno never materialized. But Darjeeling tea clung to him like the wriggling insects clung to the rolls of the sticky fly traps in the eateries near Crawford Market.

As had spotlessly clean facilities like the ones of the bagno he had owned and managed ever since his parents retired, 17 years ago.

As soon as Ingegnere Giovanni emerged, the woman resumed her mopping. He unlocked the door of his office and invited us in. It wasn't just the doors that were the same; so was the size of the cubbyhole. He squeezed his slender frame into the single chair behind a small desk crammed into the cubicle.

Stripped of any sensation of personal space, the immediate proximity of three bodies in what originally had been designed as a restroom felt oddly intimate. But official notifications and regulations, signed and stamped by the appropriate Italian authorities on every single page, were expertly laminated and wallpapered on the partition behind us to annihilate even the most innocuous intention of becoming physically or even emotionally involved.

Italians abide by the law. It says so on paper.

We must have made quite an impression. Not only did we get our umbrella, two beach chairs, and a sunbed for the next couple of days, but—smiling generously—Ingegnere Giovanni gave us a discount and colored our spot, second row from the waterfront, with a yellow marker on a freehand plan of the bagno, rattling the instructions from the papers behind our backs, assuming they'd be beyond our grasp.

"The lifeguard will get you settled," he said, and he picked up the walkie-talkie on his desk to formally announce our arrival. We had been vetted and approved.

Italian beach holidays require an attitude that is just as regimented as the ombrellone, the sdrai, and the lettini prendisole on the white sand, flattened to the perfection of a pool table; an attitude that is relaxed only after the first Spritz Campari is shared with the neighbors, a family that has rented the exact same spot for the season over the last 23 years and plans to continue doing so for the next couple of decades.

A day at a bagno is a ritual. It's not just about soaking up the sun and the country's beach culture; it's about perfecting your sprezzatura, the art of portraying yourself with composed nonchalance and class like only Italians can, even when they are wearing the tiniest of bikinis or a speedo so tight it would make me gasp for air and whistle through my teeth exhaling.

By the time we got to our allocated spot, the blue dotted umbrella was up, our beach chairs and sunbed had been covered in Argentinian blue terrycloth towels with a beige trim, and the bagnino— our section's lifeguard, confidante, and superintendant—was already discussing the affairs of the day with a couple in their early forties whose tan revealed they had spent the summer in Il Forte. They turned out to be our front row neighbors and greeted us with a cheerful buongiorno before he settled in one of the beach chairs, checking his mobile, while she stretched out on the sunbed with feline insouciance, thumbing through the pages of her book until she found where she had left off, the page still smeared with yesterday's sunscreen.

My copy of Hemingway's 'Complete Short Stories' was no match for the sprezzatura she so effortlessly displayed throughout the day. Plus, I'm a sucker for dark haired women with blue eyes; hers fitted the beach towels. An innately compassionate expression along with a permanent, tender smile suggested that her world was a wonderful place by birth, not effort. But her choice of Paolo Cognetti’s 'Giù nella Valle,' a stark portrayal of life in the Italian mountains, seemed an unlikely companion for a sun-drenched beach in Forte.

Caffé Principe - Parco Gioco Piazza Marconi at Forte dei Marmi

We didn't share a Spritz Campari. There was no opportunity. If we were the occasional snoops, trying their damnedest to fit in, they were 'bagno royalty' who, the entire time, were according audiences to Forte's prominent sunbathers and most of the neighborhood bagnini, sharing stories as if they hadn't met for ages and waving away Senegalese beach vendors or Asian masseuses with a single hand gesture that was both courteous and imperious.

We've got a long way to go before we transform into true bagno devotees.

Forte is closing for winter soon. The beaches will be empty; the bagni will store their umbrellas, empty their pools, and license the bagnini and chestnut-haired women that brandished their mops. Suntans will be fading week after week, and there will be puddles in the gravel of the parking lots.

We'll run out of sunlight to work on our beach aplomb. To learn from the best.

Maybe we should go south. José Ignacio comes to mind. We'll bring Ingegnere Giovanni along. He'll survive Montevideo hands down and may still double his yearly revenue opening the first Italian bagno on the beaches of Uruguay.

We'll get him hooked on yerba maté in no time.

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