The Spectacular Italian Beach That No One Knows About
Not even most Italians.
Anyone subscribing to Cappuccino knows my opinion of Italy. When the earth was formed billions of years ago out of a speck of cosmic dust, a dozen or so lesser countries were sacrificed just to make one Italy. She has no equal in her depth of history, manmade beauty, natural beauty, culture, churches, or museums. The superiority of her language, her talents, her impact on Western Civilization, in my opinion, it is unrivaled.
And then there are her beaches.
Admittedly, some of Italy’s beaches are overrun with sun seekers, stripey umbrellas, and screaming children. A trip last year to Tarquinia’s beach left us united in our resolve to never repeat it. But as a card-carrying curmudgeon and misanthrope—a condition, I must confess, that is only getting worse with age—I like my beaches like I like my photographs, which is unencumbered by pesky humanity.
That’s why, as proof of my love for this community of likeminded souls here at Cappuccino, I am letting you in on a well-guarded secret: La Spiaggia delle Due Sorelle, the Beach of the two Sisters (nuns, in this instance). I haven’t visited every beach in Italy—yet—but I am pretty confident in saying you will never find a more beautiful and remote beach than this one. And here’s the best part: you can access it only by rowboat or the occasional ferry.
It’s called La Spiaggia delle Due Sorelle because of the twin white rocks emerging out of the crystal blue water. Seen from a distance, they resemble two nuns kneeling at prayer.
The beach itself consists of pebbles and sand. At one end of the beach, due to the position of the cove to the tide, the pebbles are black. At the other end, the pebbles are white. Standing inside one of its coastal caves is like being inside a giant conch shell, which imparts a feeling of mystical connection to the sea and has the effect of softening its hollow roar.
Additional feature benefits:
There are no restaurants or services, which is a deterrent to at least 90% of all beachgoers.
You can hear the ocean, the wind, the seabirds instead of incessant human noise.
There’s a feeling of delicious isolation.
If you leave so much as a cigarette butt, I will personally hunt you down and roast you over a spit.
The beach, one of two that are part of Conero Park in the Ancora region, is yet further evidence that Mother Nature loves only Italy and hates the rest of the world, especially Galveston, Texas, which is where I used to have to go to “get my beach on.” Between the Spring Break keggers, the seaweed, and the diesel-belching trucks, which are allowed to park right on the beach, I don’t actually have words to describe the feeling of despair I used to experience there.
Ours is an aqueous planet. When we’re on an uncrowded beach, our minds enter into a mildly meditative state characterized by calm, peace, unity, and a sense of general happiness and satisfaction with life in that moment. We are hardwired to be drawn to water, fascinated by it. Our ancestral protohumans crawled out of the warm bath of the oceans primeval, grew legs, built fires, and danced.
All the more reason to put La Spiaggia delle Due Sorelle at the top of your bucket list. You don’t want to miss this.
What’s the most beautiful beach you’ve ever been to? We want to hear! Leave your thoughts and opinions below.
Aaagh...you had me until you mentioned Galveston, which is miss in concept if not in reality. My favorite beach here in Oregon is at Oceanside, which is so off the beaten path that the road there actually ends at the parking lot. It's a small town, and the beach is rarely populated with tourists, which makes it that much better.
We explored the city and countryside every weekend when we lived in Rome in the early '60s. In a break from churches, museums and hill towns, one Sunday we discovered the stretch of coast known as Sabaudia between Anzio and Monte Circeo. Today there are clubs and villas encroaching on the beach, but back then you could park along the Lungomare di Sabaudia and make your way several hundred meters through the dunes to the water, which was clean and clear and people-free. You could bask and body surf and be the only biped for kilometers in either direction. Across the road were fenced areas that encompassed lagoons and the occasional buffalo (mozzarella di bufala!), posted with signs that read "Vietato l'Accesso" with the international pictogram for explosives. Apparently, land mines laid by the German army in WWII had yet to be cleared. We much preferred Sabaudia to the beach clubs of Fregene or Ostia. Later in the decade, we grew to love the thin black sand beaches of Lago di Bracciano where we sailed. The wind was unpredictable, as one finds on a caldera lake, with a tendency to swirl, and there times when we'd be unable to tack and beat back to the beach. So we implemented a rule that anyone sailing from Anguillara Sabazia was required to carry a gettone (telephone token) in their bikini bra so that, once clear across the lake in Trevignano, they could call the trattoria across the road from the beach. The Signora would then send one of her sons over to alert us and we'd set off around the lake with the car and boat trailer.
And about Galveston and Bolivar and High Island... sigh. Tar balls, odiferous brown water and flesh-eating bacteria. What sad little barrier islands in a sorry excuse of a gulf. When I first arrived on the Gulf Coast, I had to rove all the way down to Padre Island before I found blue water and even then, the amount of plastic and waste and number of jacked-up trucks on the sand was soul-crushing. Nothing says beach like inebriated Spring-breakers, deafening sub-woofers, exhaust fumes and Whataburger wrappers collecting in the dunes. No. For stateside beaches, give me Big Sur or the coast just south of Crescent City along Del Norte Coastal Redwoods SP.