It’s half past six in the morning. I’m standing on the shore, I see my own shadow and an absurd, still sleepy thought comes to me: if I wasn’t on the Tyrrhenian Sea but the Adriatic, the shadow wouldn’t float from the beach to the sea, but crawl from the sea onto the sand stamped with birds’ feet.

I’m alone but for two members of staff I know well. The lifeguard is tidying away the chairs, broken and scattered after a night raid of ‘persons unknown’ that he knows well. “They don’t know how to drink,” he says without anger. “They’re thirteen, fourteen at most, and they’re letting rip after four months of lockdown… Worse than the Swiss who come at the end of September or the beginning of October and drink themselves into a stupor, wine, spritz, beer, but they don’t destroy anything. Their