The excellence of Italian bathing waters has also been confirmed in 2024. On the basis of the monitoring activities of the National Environmental Protection System, the classification of stretches of coast used for bathing. The results show that 5,090 km of marine stretches (95.6% of the monitored coast) are included in the “excellent” quality class, the highest foreseen by the European classification system. If we also add the sections with a “good” classification (153 kilometres, equal to 2.9% of the total) we arrive at 98.5%. Furthermore, 32 km (0.6%) fall into the “sufficient” quality class, 44 km into “poor” quality (0.8%). The kilometers of coastline in “excellent” quality reach very high percentages in every region, with peaks above 98% in Puglia (99.7%), Friuli Venezia Giulia (99%), Sardinia (98.4%) and Tuscany (98.2%). The differences in values close to or above 90%, which in all regional areas demonstrate the excellent quality of our bathing water, are also attributable to the specific characteristics of the monitored coasts.
Similar percentages emerge for the quality of bathing water lakes and rivers: on the 662 km over which monitoring takes place, 630 km are bathed by water of excellent quality, equal to 95.2% of the total monitored. 20 km are in good quality (3.1%), 6 km in sufficient quality (0.9%), 1 km in poor quality (0.2%). These are now consolidated data, which confirm what was found in previous years, the result of the surveillance and control activity carried out by the environmental agencies, which carry out monitoring in most of the regions. Over the course of 2023, the SNPA took approximately 26 thousand samples of sea water and over 2,300 samples of water from rivers and lakes, for a total of more than 28 thousand samplings. There are two microbiological parameters on the basis of which the swimmability of the water is evaluated, the concentrations of Escherichia coli and intestinal enterococci. Overall, they are 4,710 areas on which monitoring is carried out. At a European level, Italian waters are better than the average of EU countries, based on data processed by the European Environment Agency.
