The Italian seas are clean. For 2020, over 5400 km of bathing water have been classified as “excellent”, ie around 95% of all those classified and examined are in excellent health.
The good news comes from the National Environmental Protection System, which has released new data regarding bathing water. The latter include not only marine waters, but also shallow, current or lake waters, where bathing is expressly authorized or not prohibited.
Sardinia and Puglia, with 99.7% of kilometers of “excellent” swimming coasts, are the two regions with the most positive data, and they are also two of the regions with the largest extension of coast, 1,400 km well, the island of nuraghi and almost 800 for the heel of the boot of Italy.
However, there are nine regions that register over 90% of kilometers of excellent bathing water, after the mentioned Sardinia and Puglia, also Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, Liguria, Veneto, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Basilicata and Sicily “for the latter region the figure relates to 5 out of 8 provinces, in fact, it was not possible, at the moment, to find the classification of bathing water for the provinces of Agrigento, Catania and Messina).
Italy as a whole is better than the European average, as shown by the latest report available from the European Environment Agency (referring however to the period 2015-2018), according to which I am the 85% excellent bathing water, with many countries below this percentage.
Fresh water is also excellent. According to the new analysis, the lakes boast 390 kilometers of bathing water classified as “excellent”.
Considering the over 6,000 km of sea that bathe the coasts of our country, according to the latest analysis, 5400 are classified as excellent. For each of them, at least once a month for the duration of the season, the Arpa / Appa perform samplings and analyses to protect swimmers. And the results are truly encouraging.
“Since 2010, with Legislative Decree 30 May 2008 n. 116 and with the subsequent publication of the Ministerial Decree 30/3/2010 (Official Gazette of 24 May 2010 SO 97) – the report reads – Italy has implemented the European Directive 2006/7 / EC on Bathing Water which regulates the matter. This legislation is aimed at protecting human health by monitoring two indicators of faecal contamination (intestinal enterococci and escherichia coli)”.
For each “bathing water”, the monitoring points representative of the quality of the entire area are identified. Overall, in a bathing season, environmental agencies carry out over 24,000 samplings and as many laboratory analyzes to determine the presence of the two microbiological parameters that indicate the quality of the bathing water, for a total, therefore, of over 48,000 analytical determinations.
At the beginning of each bathing season, bathing waters are “classified” according to the 4 quality classes valid throughout Europe: Excellent, Good, Sufficient, Poor. By 2020, over five thousand and four hundred kilometers of bathing water on the Italian coast have been classified with the highest class, that is “excellent”, approximately 95% of all those classified.
“These data, however – concludes the report – must not make us rest on our laurels . The quality of bathing water is a significant indicator of the load of raw water that arrives from the water courses into the sea. Areas not served by sewers, connections to missing sewers, insufficient functioning of the purification system, etc. they determine contributions of faecal contamination, and not only, which require structural remediation actions. Attention must always be very high in all these aspects”.
