The rushes

I cannot recall when I first had the idea of visiting a naturist beach, it must have been when I was a teenager. I grew up in a small Italian town on the Adriatic coast, one of those touristic towns where the long sandy beaches are covered with umbrellas, cabins and food kiosks during the summer time. A town which gets populated by mostly Northern Italian tourists during the summer months and empties out during the winter months. Near the river mouth, on the outskirts of town, a part of the beach has not been equipped with any facilities, and there the wild river flora flourished unimpeded. During the foggy and relatively rigid winters of the Northern Adriatic coast, the only physical elements recalling the not-so-distant human presence in this part of the seaside, are two imposing pyramid-shaped buildings, built in the late Seventies, and only inhabited during the summer months by the few remaining summer house owners who still make their way every year to this relatively old-fashioned holiday destination. Except for the noise produced by the few trains running without stopping along the coastal railway, and ignoring this little appealing part of the Adriatic Sea coastline, the waves crashing on the foreshore provide the only audible sound. In this forgotten seaside area, between the rushes separating the beach from the train tracks, and along the nearby river banks, men coming from this rural province, have found a place to meet, hiding from indiscrete eyes, and from the parochial views of the local population. All year long, among the rushes, men freely express their sexuality, unbounded and spared from the human menace, just like the flora surrounding them. During the warm days, from April to September, in larger loud groups during the summer months, and to the discomfort of the residents of the daunting housing complex nearby, naturist tourists populate the beach. Behind them, the regular local men generally prefer the privacy of the rushes.

The sea

When I was I teenager, I had a friend who lived in one of the pyramidal buildings surrounding the beach. She sometimes invited me to have lunch at her place, and we would later bathe in the sea. Once, we decided to swim until the point in which the river flows into the sea, a sense of curiosity pervading us at the idea of taking a closer peek at the nudity of the people we could see sunbathing in that remote part of the beach. While taking respite from the swim, through a furtive glance, I had my first visual encounter with a naturist beach, and I exchanged a smile of mockery with my friend.

The beach

In a warm day of July 2020, two months after the first lockdown imposed during the Coronavirus pandemic ended, I took my towel and my sunscreen, I hopped on my bike and I went straight to the river mouth. My legs were shaking as I inched along the beach after leaving my bike tied to a pole. Around me, some naturists sunbathed silently, spread out on the sand, others chatted not too loudly. Some turned their gaze discretely towards me as I walked past them. I laid my towel out on the sand, I took my t-shirt off, and after a small hesitation, I took both my pants and my underwear off at once. I laid down on my towel, letting the warmth of the sand permeate my entire body without the impediment of any piece of cloth. I felt the fresh sea breeze gently caressing my exposed genitals. With my eyes closed, I smiled with pleasure.

My father was a photographer. One of his favourite subjects were people laying in the sun on my hometown’s beach. He loved the poses they took while sunbathing, their imperfect body shapes. Many of his shots were taken secretly, while people were sleeping or relaxing with their eyes closed. Many times he photographed beach goers a few meters down the beach, close to the housing estate. And yet, he never approached the part of the shore next to the river mouth nor the rushes behind it. Reality did not scare him, as he did not seek to depict an idealized view of my hometown beach. Simply, he had a deep respect for the untouched nature of that place, and for its sole regular visitors.

Post scriptum

We tend to consider that we have experienced all the most basic gestures and feelings of our bodies during our first years of life. For a small child, being naked in public looks indeed like a natural thing. However, re-discovering the feeling of being naked in public in my mid-twenties was like experiencing it anew. This very simple gesture, and the sensation it provided me, was the single most revolutionary move my body enacted in its adult life. Since then, I have considered myself a naturist.

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