The Naked and the Med

ALL of Paris seemed to be en vacances, and the city belonged to the tourists; Rome was closed down for ferragosto, Italy's best-loved annual holiday; Bonn seemed a smaller town in Germany than ever. Where had all the Europeans gone? They had taken to the roads and beaches, turning the Riviera into an ever more delirious nightmare of traffic jams and suntan oil.

August, in short, is Europe's most grueling month, when by custom almost everyone on the Continent goes on vacation at the same time. If official estimates are to be believed, fully half of West Germany's 59 million people are away from their homes. More than 50% of these have left Germany for Austria, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia and other points south; 29 flights a week arrive in Majorca from Germany. Half of The Netherlands' 13 million people are out of their country. Some 22 million Frenchmen (46% of the population) continue to insist upon their August vacation despite government plaints that the country can no longer afford its annual month-long paralysis.

The number of Europeans on the road, on the rails or in the air this summer has reached a record 75 million, triple the level of 15 years ago. Largely because much of Europe was beset by the wettest and coldest July in a decade --the worst in France in 90 years--the hordes have been moving south to the Mediterranean in greater numbers and later in the summer than ever before.

This year's migration to the Med has already produced its own new Baedeker of unprecedented pollution, prices, crowding and--less trying of course --exposure of skin to sun (see map). Cost? A few venturesome Italians have discovered that a 15-day tour of Eastern Europe and Russia can be cheaper than two weeks at the messy beaches of Fregene, a popular resort near Rome. Pollution? The French have taken pains to clean up their beaches; however, the Mediterranean around Spain and some parts of Italy has become a mixture of urban and industrial effluents.

Crowds? On Ibiza, the neighbors of Hughes-Hoax Author Clifford Irving can blame him for making the island a household name; it has become so crowded that some travelers sleep in cars or on the roadsides. On the Greek island of Ios, police no longer allow the young knapsack-setters who arrive by the boatload every summer to camp on the beaches. Reason: there were so many kids and so few sanitary facilities that officials feared an outbreak of disease.

So far, however, only nudity has reached epidemic proportions. The monokini, which first appeared in St.-Tropez two years ago has spread this year to the beaches of tonier Antibes, Juan-les-Pins and Sardinia. By now the fad has become so familiar that Le Figaro's food critic has commented that "a breast leaning into a local salad is as removed from sexuality as a nose, an ear or a heel bone."

Total nudity meantime has become a mass phenomenon. So many Frenchmen want to spend their vacations au naturel that the government has turned over to them most of Cap d'Agde, one of seven resort centers being developed along the "new Riviera" between Marseille and the Spanish border. The Fountainebleau of the bare set is Port Ambonne, a year-old, $4,000,000 complex on the Cap d'Agde, which has its own yacht basin and supermarket for nudists. Families have paid up to $26,000 for two-or three-room condominiums in an amphitheater-shaped apartment tower that curves around a nude-swimming pool. So far this year, some 25,000 nudists, about half of them foreigners, have visited the complex for a few carefree days of freedom from the world of those whom they refer to with mild contempt as "les textiles."

Hard Labor. Even Communist Yugoslavia now has a string of nudist camps along the Adriatic Coast for the benefit of foreign tourists. Earlier this month it also played host to the 13th World Congress of Naturalists, though not without a bit of embarrassment. The Croatian Minister for Tourism angrily canceled an appearance at the congress when informed that he was expected to show up in the buff.

For the more or less clothed, one beach in particular belongs to all of Europe, and all of Europe seems to descend upon it in August. That is the 25 miles of broad sandy coast on either side of Rimini, part of Italy's Adriatic Riviera. The cost can be modest--$10 a day buys a room and meals--for those willing to holiday amid beach umbrellas ten to 30 rows deep. Some Italians who are compelled to take their vacations in the August crush have characterized them as holidays at hard labor. After the vacationer has fought the battle of the traffic, train or plane, staked out a place on the beach, paid for each umbrella and chair, made a scene to get the rooms he booked months ago and then been kept awake by the roar of motorcycles and rock groups, he might well consider himself more oppressed than he was in the city.

Then why does the custom of August vacations persist? Partly it is sheer habit, but partly also the crush begins with the large industries, whose managers claim that only by shutting down altogether can major maintenance be done and everyone be given a holiday without an unacceptable slowdown of the assembly lines. After the factories close, a whole chain of related businesses follows suit. Then the food, clothing and other industries schedule their vacations for the "dead" period. Even so, Europeans seem in no hurry to change. When Italian workers were recently polled on their vacation preferences, almost 80% said that they would choose August.

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