the wounded animal

Italy can be a singular country, where the nicest food, the most visited monuments, the oldest history, piazzas, etc. can live together with mafia, priests, politicians and a mix of the three above... It's been only three months since I got fined because I was surfing in front of a privately managed beach (nobody swimming in the water, just a local politician getting his fat ass tanned on the beach calling the authorities to stop this couple of "surfing killers", aka myself and another guy from Milan...) that the nightmare of an unaccessible sea was back, this time at my homespot on the Adriatic Coast. I wasn't there, but when I got a call from my friends, telling me they got kicked out of water from an old, white-dressed "guardia costiera", I had the feeling something was turning bad again...

It is surely unquestionable that safety must come first, so nothing is wrong in alerting (and stopping) any activity when this can be harmful to someone else. Less convincing is the fact that nobody says a word about letting people simply go for a swim or with a canoe or a "pattino" on a 4 ft swell, coming together with dangerous rips and heavy shorebreaks. Or is it because the same people you allow to get in the water, no matter what the conditions are, will later spend their daily 30 euros for the sunbed, or the cocktail-on-the-beach when the happy hour bell rings in the afternoon?
In the last 10 years, the face of my beautiful hometown coastline has turned awful: free beaches have become open air discos and brothels, picturesque wooden cabins got sacrificed in the name of gray cement boxes, the sand is now just a huge ashtray for left boozes; I've seen bulldozers shoveling down sand dunes to make room for a new "Bagno".
Not a single politician doing something, everyone apparently happy to use Mother Nature as a new playground for getting drunk...
When I was a child, I used to love summertime: no school, three months on the beach doing nothing...
Things have now changed, I feel like the sea is not mine from every July until September. Like a wounded animal, it rests suffering until the first chilly dawns of October, smiling back at you while you wear some neoprene top before duck diving into it, when you almost hear a voice whispering: "I've been missing you, welcome back..."