At an Italian beach club, the distance between one umbrella and the next can be measured in meters. The distance between the first row and the fifth is better measured in years.

The best positions—the ones nearest the water, where the breeze is stronger and the view unobstructed—rarely go to whoever arrives first. They belong to families who have returned to the same patch of sand for decades, renewing their places each summer. To move forward, one waits for somebody else to leave. Somebody almost never does.

This is the particular social order of the bagno, the Italian beach club. Along the country’s coastline, such establishments give summer its familiar look—precise rows of deck chairs, wooden cabins, striped awnings, and paths swept clean of sand.

To visitors, a bagno, also sometimes called a lido or a stabilimento balneare, may appear to be simply a place to rent a chair and order lunch. To its regulars, it is closer to a second home—one with a preferred table, familiar neighbors, and a beach attendant who has watched children become parents.

Nowhere is this culture more codified than in Forte dei Marmi, the resort town on Tuscany’s Versilian coast where discretion is cultivated as carefully as a tan. 

Bagno Assunta, which opened before the 1960s, has passed through several owners. A few years ago, it was acquired by Collezione Em, the family-run hospitality group behind boutique hotels in Tuscany and Venice. With the property came something less easily transferred: a population of fiercely loyal regulars.

Sara Maestrelli, the group’s creative director, spent her own childhood summers in Forte dei Marmi. She understood that, after decades at the same tables and beneath the same umbrellas, Bagno Assunta’s returning families did not see themselves merely as customers.

They also knew exactly where they stood within the club.

At Bagno Assunta, as at many traditional beach clubs, the rows nearest the water are both the most expensive and the hardest to obtain. There are practical advantages: the air is cooler, the sea closer, the parade of people behind you rather than in front. But a first-row umbrella also conveys something that cannot be listed on a price sheet. It says that a family has been here for a very long time.

The culture is less about conspicuous display than the privilege of being known. There is no need to announce one’s arrival when the waiter remembers the usual order and the attendant is already unfolding the chairs.

Even the clubs themselves are expected to remain recognizable. Forte dei Marmi’s historic bagni are protected as part of the area’s heritage; defining features, including their names and colors, cannot be casually altered. Each club maintains its own aesthetic—custom fabrics, painted wood, particular combinations of stripes and shades. While plastic has colonized beaches elsewhere, here wood and cloth still prevail, much of it made locally.

The effect is nostalgic without appearing staged. A well-kept bagno does not resemble a recreation of the past, though it acts as if much of modern beach culture—the bottle service, the D.J., the thudding afternoon soundtrack—never became necessary.

Farther north, on the Ligurian coast, the umbrellas are packed between green hills and a darker, more dramatic sea. Santa Margherita Ligure sits just beyond Portofino, without quite the same appetite for spectacle. There, the Grand Hotel Miramare has operated a beach club since 1945.

Now called Bagni Mira, the club was long known as Bagni Miramare. Andrea Fustinoni and his family have run it alongside the hotel for generations, observing the annual migration of guests to the shoreline.

Believe it or not, summer was not always Liguria’s main attraction. Before the beach club opened, the Miramare’s high season was winter, when the coast’s mild climate was the biggest draw. By the early 1950s, however, Bagni Mira had become home to one of Europe’s best-known water-ski centers, and in 1958, parts of Racconti d’Estate (the comedy starring Marcello Mastroianni, Sylva Koscina, and Alberto Sordi) were filmed at the Grand Hotel Miramare and its beach club. The movie presented a version of la vita al mare that still shapes the foreign imagination: handsome people behaving badly, romantic complications conducted in bathing suits, and long afternoons in which nobody appears pressed for time.

The water skis are gone, and yet families return each year. Children find the same playmates. The most established guests retain their places, while those behind them monitor the front row for signs of movement.

How, then, does someone finally reach the sea?

Mostly by waiting.

An umbrella becomes available only when a family chooses not to renew it. This is rare enough to feel momentous. Progress may happen one row at a time, over years or even generations. The system is not formally hereditary, but it can look remarkably like inheritance.

To an outsider, such devotion to one beach—one restaurant table, one umbrella, one view—may seem almost absurd. Italy has thousands of miles of coastline. Why return to precisely the same few square meters of it?

For Fustinoni, repetition is the point. A true Italian beach club offers the comforts of home without requiring anyone to remain there. The apparent simplicity of the experience is supported by an intricate system designed to make everything feel effortless.

It is a known place, he said, and therefore an easy one.

And this may be the bagno’s deepest luxury. Not service, exactly, and not exclusivity, though both have their role. It is the assurance that summer will be waiting in its accustomed position: the same faces under the same striped umbrellas, the same table set for lunch, the sea exactly where everyone left it.

Bagni Mira has a saying for the balance its guests expect, one that could serve as a philosophy for the entire Italian seaside:

“Not too chic, but chic enough.”