“The sea of Sardinia? It tastes like a copy shop. The one from the Riviera is the real original”

Rimini, September 8, 2026 – There is a moment, in the “Definitive Treatise on the Romagna Riviera” by Alessandro Gori, known as Lo Sgargabonzib, when it becomes clear that defending the sea of Rimini means above all stopping defending it. No longer saying, in front of a friend just back from Sardinia: “Yes, it’s true, our sea isn’t great, but…”. Because it is precisely in that “but” that the surrender lies. It is the point where one accepts that there is an original sea – transparent, turquoise, uncontaminated – and an Adriatic that would only be its defective copy.

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Gori flips the table: the sea of Rimini is the real one. It is the Sardinian one that feels like a copy.

This provocation alone, both absurd and perfectly coherent, would be enough to explain the tone of the show staged Saturday evening at the Grottarossa social center in Rimini. About sixty spectators, mostly in their thirties, a simple stage set up on the lawn, and the short film of the same title, shot in Milano Marittima and directed by Eddie da Silva, providing a counterpoint. No spectacular scenery, because the scenery, in the end, is already all in the mind of anyone who has spent at least one summer on the Riviera.

Postcards from the Romagna Riviera

There are hotels and guesthouses, Piz Buin creams, arcades, mini-golf courses, and piadinerias

From Cattolica to Marina di Ravenna, passing through Riccione, Rimini, Milano Marittima, Pinarella, and Lido di Dante, Gori builds a sentimental and distorted geography of the Romagna coast. There are hotels and guesthouses, Piz Buin creams, arcades, mini-golf courses, piadinerias with their unmistakable red and white, blue and white, and green and white vertical stripes. And it is precisely these last ones that become material for an almost psychoanalytic digression: he didn’t like them because they reminded him of the little trees of Despar printed on his grandmother’s potholders.

This is the most successful mechanism of Lo Sgargabonzi: taking an insignificant detail and continuing to dig until something huge, disturbing, or simply ridiculous appears underneath. The result recalls, for associative freedom and ferocity, a certain tradition of Italian black humor, with echoes of Daniele Luttazzi, but it has a personal language. Gori doesn’t tell jokes about the Riviera: he dissects it.

Alessandro Gori, Tuscan, born 1978, is a writer, poet, monologist, and comedian, best known as Lo Sgargabonzi

And under the scalpel fall especially those places Marc Augé would have called non-places. Only here they are non-places in which we have lived. The Hotel Villa Lalla then counts as much as the Grand Hotel, perhaps even more. Because on the Riviera there will never really be a Grand Hotel “Sayonara” or a Pension “Majestic”: names, signs, and hotel categories obey a mysterious grammar of vacationing that we all know without ever having studied it.

The show with monologues, poems, and videos

The show alternates monologues, poems, and videos, and is partly taken from the book “Selling Thyroid Due to Double Gift” which, not coincidentally, shows on the cover a photo of the author when he was two years old on vacation at the sea in Bellaria. A volume whose proceeds, he jokes, are destined for the arms industry to manufacture anti-personnel mines to be tested on children: the hyperbole is so atrocious that it first forces laughter and immediately after makes you wonder why you laughed. It is one of Gori’s hallmarks. Black humor does not console: it illuminates with cruel precision what we would normally prefer not to look at.

What contemporary Milano Marittima looks like under Gori’s lens

Even contemporary Milano Marittima enters the blender. Gori populates it with groups of kids with “alpaca hair,” white t-shirts, and very baggy shorts, busy building a threatening image among benches, cars, and fountains.

Then Christian Raimo appears, who instead invites understanding: we have handed young people a terrible world, he argues, and perhaps that generation is even better than ours. All while spreading Piz Buin on his friend’s back. “Madonna, the nervousness,” is Gori’s conclusion. And in three words the entire sociological reasoning is blown up.

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The identity of the Riviera

But it would be a mistake to read the “Treatise” as a long mockery of the Riviera. It is almost the opposite.

Beneath the harshness there is an authentic, even tender feeling, towards this piece of Italy. Gori can afford to massacre it precisely because it belongs to him. The sea with the dead jellyfish, the mucilage, the umbrellas, the guesthouses, the piadinerias, and the unlikely signs is not the backdrop of the perfect vacation: it is a landscape of identity.

And indeed the funniest target becomes the “asshole” friend who goes to Sardinia and then comes back to explain how ugly the Adriatic is. In Lo Sgargabonzi’s cosmology something wonderful happens: as soon as he arrives, the sea of Rimini fills with mucilage and dead jellyfish; as soon as he leaves, it becomes beautiful again. As if even the Adriatic had an opinion about its detractors.

The real sea of Romagna defeated by other people’s vacation photos

The audience laughs a lot. But it is not an innocent laugh. They laugh because they recognize places, rituals, objects, and obsessions that belong to a common imaginary. And they laugh above all at the continuous gap between the modesty of the observed object and the enormity of the conclusion that Gori manages to draw from it.

The title, “Definitive Treatise on the Romagna Riviera,” already contains everything: the disproportion between the diminutive “treatise” and the monstrous claim to be “definitive.” Naturally, it is not definitive. And perhaps it does not want to be.

It is rather a declaration of love written with the ink of impatience. Because Gori seems to have understood something that tourism promotion could hardly afford to say: we do not really love a place because it is perfect. We love it because we recognize even its flaws before we even see them.

So, in the end, that sea remains. Murky sometimes, greenish at other times, continuously defeated in other people’s vacation photos. Yet real. Terribly, magnificently real.

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