In Triste there is a municipal bathing establishment with two separate areas, one for men and one for women. It’s called “Alla Lanterna” and on Saturday 20 June it was the scene of a brawl between two tourists and a swimmer from Trieste. At the center of the dispute, as reported by the Trieste newspaper Smallthe encroachment of the tourist into the “men’s sector”, in defiance of the rules of the structure. When asked to respect the division, the tourist couple allegedly indulged in harsh comments and insults: «You live in the Middle Ages. Your city is not Italian, but a city of sexist idiots who still divide the beach between men and women, this is gender discrimination… shame on you”.
Discrimination or protection, sexism or maximum form of relaxation? The episode opens a debate on the social dynamics and use of spaces, also shining a light on the so-called safe spacethe places where you can feel emotionally and physically safe. But to grasp at least a little the echo of this episode we must first understand the philosophy of the place. Otherwise the risk is to head towards this “drying room” with the mental categories that we would apply to any other reasoning.
THE LAST SEASIDE BASTION OF EUROPE
The people of Trieste simply call him “el pedocìn”, even if the registry office – as we were saying – says “Alla Lanterna”. It is a municipal establishment “consisting of two distinct and separate areas: one for women and children up to 12 years of age, the other for men”, we read on DiscoverTriestethe tourist information portal of the Municipality of Trieste. Separating the two sectors is a high wall that ends directly in the water. In practice, el pedoncìn is the only beach in Europe where men and women have separate spaces. The wall, three meters high, dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century and to the need of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to guarantee “decorum”. We are, to be clear, in the era of Emperor Franz Joseph, his Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty.
HERESY OR SAFE PLACE?
Women and men divided by a wall, therefore. A heresy for the politically correct of 2026? Today – tell who was there – for many women that wall is not a prison, but a liberation. It is the space where you feel free from judgements, serene about who you are and how you present yourself that day.
In August 2023, a demonstration of solidarity took place at Pedocìn towards some Muslim women criticized for entering the water with a burkini: a dressed swim organized by the Trieste Greens, a flash mob in the water to say that «the sea belongs to all of us, dressed or not, as we likein full freedom in the true sense of the word.”
SAME BEACH SAME SEA
Since the construction of divider well over a hundred years have passed. Meanwhile the beach has never been touched. El pedoncìn is then, in its own way, the oldest and most functioning experiment of safe space of Europe? And how will men experience it, will it still be a comfortable situation? The question is open, the debate can continue. On the beach, certainly, but not only.
