Beneath the Yachts and Venues, Posidonia Meadows Pay the Real Price.by Manuela RafaianiThere is a moment in the history of every place that our world has learned to love when beauty ceases to be “the reason” and becomes a pretext. Over the past few decades, Costa Smeralda seems to have crossed precisely this threshold, from a destination chosen for its natural grace to a stage upon which, every summer, an increasingly estranged ritual is enacted. Those who knew that coast before it became synonymous with a certain kind of “luxury” remember a landscape that was almost austere in its beauty: granite polished by the wind, Mediterranean scrub, and a sea whose clarity seemed to belong to another geological era. Today, the same landscape seems to be the Instagram conquest ground of a crowd more interested in showing off than looking, a humanity that treats the coast as the backdrop for a permanent performance, where the worth of a place is measured by visibility rather than authenticity. This is not nostalgia. Nostalgia looks backward; it feeds on a past it mourns and can no longer touch. On the contrary, this is a direct gaze toward the future, an act of responsibility that grants no discounts. It is a clear-eyed reading of what we are taking away from those who will come after us; it is a reckoning with the weight of every gesture made today. Present destruction is not an abstract harm but a theft already committed against the future. It is not a matter of mourning what Costa Smeralda has been, but of demanding that it continue to exist. This is the difference between complaint and vision: the first turns toward memory; the second calls the present to account. The human load can no longer be treated as a technical detail in an environmental report: it is the very signature of this transformation. Venues multiply season after season, construction sites know no respite, and the built environment thickens year after year along coasts that were once sparse and silent. Every new structure, every new settlement, takes something away from an equilibrium that nature took millennia to compose and that humanity presumes to rewrite in the span of a few tourist seasons. But it is underwater that the most silent wound is inflicted. The meadows of Posidonia oceanica—a millennia-old plant, not an alga, as is sometimes believed, capable of growing only a few centimeters a year, are torn apart by the anchors of boats that crowd those waters every summer. When an anchor is dropped onto a seabed where the meadow is present, it can rip out leaves and roots, creating bare patches that take decades to heal. This is not merely aesthetic damage: it is the destruction of an ecosystem that protects coastlines from erosion, produces oxygen, and shelters the marine life that makes that sea what it is. What is striking in this scenario is the underlying paradox: the more a place is celebrated for its beauty, the more it attracts the very forces that risk corroding it. Costa Smeralda continues to be described as a paradise while slowly losing the qualities that made it one. In their place is a crowded choreography of yachts, venues, and shop windows, where excess has become a common, and often vulgar, language, and restraint is almost an anomaly. Perhaps the question that deserves to be asked, before it is too late, is not how much Costa Smeralda is worth on the international tourism market, but how much it still resembles itself. A territory is measured not only by the crowds it can attract, but also by its capacity to remain recognizable.

by Manuela Rafaiani There is a moment in the history of every place that our world has learned to love when beauty ceases to be “the reason” and becomes a pretext. Over the past few decades, Costa Smeralda seems to have crossed precisely this threshold, from a destination chosen for its natural grace to a stage upon which, every summer, an increasingly estranged ritual is enacted. Those who knew that coast before it became synonymous with a certain kind of “luxury” remember a landscape that was almost austere in its beauty: granite polished by the wind, Mediterranean scrub, and a sea whose clarity seemed to belong to another geological era. Today, the same landscape seems to be the Instagram conquest ground of a crowd more interested in showing off than looking, a humanity that treats the coast as the backdrop for a permanent performance, where the worth of a place is measured by visibility rather than authenticity. This is not nostalgia. Nostalgia looks backward; it feeds on a past it mourns and can no longer touch. On the contrary, this is a direct gaze toward the future, an act of responsibility that grants no discounts. It is a clear-eyed reading of what we are taking away from those who will come after us; it is a reckoning with the weight of every gesture made today. Present destruction is not an abstract harm but a theft already committed against the future. It is not a matter of mourning what Costa Smeralda has been, but of demanding that it continue to exist. This is the difference between complaint and vision: the first turns toward memory; the second calls the present to account. The human load can no longer be treated as a technical detail in an environmental report: it is the very signature of this transformation. Venues multiply season after season, construction sites know no respite, and the built environment thickens year after year along coasts that were once sparse and silent. Every new structure, every new settlement, takes something away from an equilibrium that nature took millennia to compose and that humanity presumes to rewrite in the span of a few tourist seasons. But it is underwater that the most silent wound is inflicted. The meadows of Posidonia oceanica—a millennia-old plant, not an alga, as is sometimes believed, capable of growing only a few centimeters a year, are torn apart by the anchors of boats that crowd those waters every summer. When an anchor is dropped onto a seabed where the meadow is present, it can rip out leaves and roots, creating bare patches that take decades to heal. This is not merely aesthetic damage: it is the destruction of an ecosystem that protects coastlines from erosion, produces oxygen, and shelters the marine life that makes that sea what it is. What is striking in this scenario is the underlying paradox: the more a place is celebrated for its beauty, the more it attracts the very forces that risk corroding it. Costa Smeralda continues to be described as a paradise while slowly losing the qualities that made it one. In their place is a crowded choreography of yachts, venues, and shop windows, where excess has become a common, and often vulgar, language, and restraint is almost an anomaly. Perhaps the question that deserves to be asked, before it is too late, is not how much Costa Smeralda is worth on the international tourism market, but how much it still resembles itself. A territory is measured not only by the crowds it can attract, but also by its capacity to remain recognizable.