Somehow I prefer Italian seaside resorts in the winter. In summer so many of the nation’s beaches are carved up between various bathing companies who lease their stretch of coastline from the municipal authoritie and the ‘free’ beach is reduced to a tiny stretch and becomes terribly overcrowded. True, there are ‘wild’ stretches of seacoast that one can head for but they are often without easy access and at some distance from where we live.

Paying for the privilege of accessing a stretch of the Versilia sands enables one to have a deckchair and sunshade plus showering  and changing facilities and, of course, a bar or restaurant. The area is all so manicured with regimented rows of holidaymakers gathering around them the same neighbours that they had last year…and the years before that. No polite chaos such as exists on British seaside places happens in these well-drilled stretches of the Italian Riviera: it’s like being in a holiday butlinesque open-air classroom.

In winter the region is all so refreshingly different: the beach is free of deckchairs and all the paraphernalia of holidaymakers and one can walk for miles across footprint-less and litter-free sands traversing an almost Saharan semi-solitude.

True no-one appears to be bathing – although the waters felt to me to be as warm as any on the Welsh coast during the Celtic summer but there is so much else to enjoy. We particularly love to pick up a ‘fritto misto’ from one of the floating fried fish caterers whose boats lie tied up by the sides of the main canal leading to the lighthouse at Viareggio.

The fried shrimps aren’t half-bad either.

We truly enjoyed our time in an off-duty Viareggio and the weather was quite idyllic – a spring-like day in fact with the bluest of skies and a radiant sunlight.  

What other seaside resort is fringed on one side by the most placid of seas and on the other by the most jagged of mountain ranges?

In February, Viareggio’s famous carnival is planned to take place, this year at the traditional time instead of last year’s event which had to be rescheduled for autumn because of the pandemic. We intend to participate in this gloriously creative event and truly hope that it will mark the beginning of the end of one of the most unpleasant events to have taken place during our life-time. For it was in 2020 that we last attended the carnival and it was on the last day it was held as the pageant had to be closed down prematurely because of the swelling Covid-19 emergency. Then we wore no masks, knew nothing about social distancing, and had no compulsion about disinfecting our hands when entering public establishments, shops and bars – in short we knew nothing about how radically our lives and behaviours would be altered by the ghastly virus.

Humans in common with other animals are immensely adaptable. We made the changes required by the authorities and what seemed so weird now became a matter of habit. Let us trust that we shall in the not too distant future be able to remember how we were living before that fateful last Viareggio carnival of 2020 we then attended with blissful unawareness.

Sky and sea combine:

wavelets lap our salty skin

sunshine breathes on lips.