Inside Italy is our weekly look at some of the news, talking points and gossip from Italy that you might not have heard about. It’s published each Saturday and members can receive it directly to their inbox, by going to their newsletter preferences or adding their email to the sign-up box in this article.

A leaky boot

While northern Italy has been reported as having abundant water reserves this summer following above-average rainfall in spring, large parts of the centre and south have been in the grip of a severe drought in recent months, with the islands of Sicily and Sardinia bearing the brunt of the crisis so far.  

Regional authorities in Sardinia declared a state of emergency earlier this week amid a crushing water shortage that is threatening the livelihood of thousands of local farmers.

But conditions are possibly even more alarming in Sicily, where consecutive months of hot and dry temperatures have withered crops, vineyards and fruit groves, and deprived livestock of pastureland, causing damage already estimated at 2.7 billion euros.

“There’s no hope because it hasn’t rained since May of last year. All the planted fields have been lost,” Salvatore Michele Amico, a farmer near the town of San Cataldo, in Sicily’s dry interior, told AFP this week.

While acknowledging the role played by the near-total absence of rainfall for close to a year in parts of the island, the Sicilian branch of Italy’s farmers association Coldiretti this week pointed to the persisting lack of infrastructure aimed at “using water intelligently”.

According to Italy’s national statistics office, Istat, Sicily has one of the country’s highest rates of wasted drinking water, with some 51.6 percent of water lost from distribution networks in 2022 (that’s around 157 litres of wasted water per resident every day).

But the inefficiency of water distribution networks flagged by Istat is far from being an exclusively Sicilian problem. 

According to a YouTrend report based on Istat data, 2.4 billion cubic metres of water are pumped into the water network of Italy’s 109 provincial capitals every year. Of these, over 36 percent are lost, corresponding to a daily loss of 41 cubic metres of water for every kilometre of network.

Major upgrade works on the national water distribution system are part of Italy’s PNRR – a blueprint of key infrastructure investments using EU-wide post-pandemic recovery funds – but the project’s progress has long been something of a mystery in Italy, with little to no publicly available information about timelines and overall spending.

Beach club strikes

From transport to education to healthcare, strikes are far from rare in Italy, but protests tend to be far and few between in August as millions of Italians can be found relaxing at holiday destinations up and down the boot for much of the month. 

Yet, we may still get to see some strikes this month (and slightly surprising ones at that) as beach club operators have threatened to walk out on three different dates in August amid a tug of war with the government over a contested EU directive. 

Under EU competition rules first approved in 2006 but postponed by multiple Italian governments over the years, Italy’s private beach concessions will have to be put up for public tender from January 2025 after being automatically renewed and handed down from one generation to the other for decades.

But concession holders have been fighting the EU directive tooth and nail in recent months, complaining about the lack of national criteria for the planned public tenders, and asking the government to grant some form of economic compensation to outgoing operators.

Italy’s government hasn’t yet made its stance clear on this demand, but any type of ‘deal sweetener’ would surely be hard to justify, especially after reports revealed that state coffers only collect €115 million from beach concessions – that’s against a total estimated revenue of €32 billion.

Coffee that ‘matches the colour of the Seine’

Italians are famously very proud and protective of their coffee culture, and tend to be exceptionally suspicious of caffè brewed anywhere outside of national borders. 

We got another reminder of that earlier this week as Italian sports journalist Luca Sacchi went on a memorable live-TV tirade against the coffee served at the Paris Olympics press room. 

“In the press room, there’s coffee that matches the waters of the Seine,” he said, alluding to unhealthy water pollution levels that caused the postponement of the men’s triathlon events on Tuesday. 

The journalist then doubled down: “It is probably made with the same water, then diluted with a low-quality soluble”.

Unsurprisingly, Sacchi’s invective inspired countless reactions and memes on Italian social media, with one user saying: “Someone save those poor Italian commentators from the Seine coffees”.

Inside Italy is our weekly look at some of the news and talking points in Italy that you might not have heard about. It’s published each Saturday and members can receive it directly to their inbox, by going to their newsletter preferences or adding their email to the sign-up box in this article.