Exactly one year ago I started a series of posts about the Bagnini of Rimini. And for reasons that are irrelevant, I stopped writing the series almost at the beginning of it, more exactly in its second chapter. Today, a year later, life has once again given me the challenge of helping my girlfriend's family on the beach, but in a more continuous way, not as sporadic as I did before, and I have decided to resume this series.
In that second chapter I explained the first step to start preparing the beach for the summer season. That step was to put all the roads where people walk. In this third installment of the series I will talk about the next big step in preparing the beach.
Lay all the bases to place the beach umbrellas!
This is a beach umbrella base.
The base consists of two pieces, a long piece consisting of a metal tube surrounded by cement, which is the part that is inserted into the sand, and a cement roundel that goes on top and that would be a kind of table. The two pieces are quite heavy but that is the idea to prevent the huge beach umbrellas from ending up flying with the first strong wind that arrives. The long piece weighs around 12-13 Kg and the cement rounds weigh around 5-6 Kg. We are talking about 18 or more kilograms of total weight
Transporting the long pieces in a "vertical wheelbarrow".
Everything is placed in a certain order.
The idea is to fill all this space with the bases for the beach umbrellas.
As you can see in the photo, everything is transported with these "vertical wheelbarrows". I have managed to transport a maximum of 12 of these long pieces and up to 14 of the cement rounds.
A room full of cement roundels.
The first bases that are laid, as you can see in some of the previous photos, are the ones that make up the outer perimeter of the beach. This greatly facilitates the insertion of the other bases using ropes tied to the external bases as guides on the ground. Where those ropes intersect, that's where the hole needs to be opened to plant the next foundation.
And how do you open a hole like that in the sand?
This is a question I asked myself many times until I got to do it in person. A very peculiar tool is used which is called "Trivella" in the Italian language and which literally means drill.
It took us almost three and a half days of work to fill the entire space. It was almost three and a half days for me literally digging holes in the sand almost all the time, apart from all the loading and transport of the pieces that make up the bases.
So that you can have a better idea of all the work that was done, I took some images from a webcam that is in one of the houses in front of the beach and that can be seen online all the time.
My girlfriend took a screenshot one of the days while I was working. I am marked with the red arrow.
This is how the beach looked when we finished filling it with the bases.
The area marked in red.
There were 353 bases for beach umbrellas in total!
Things I learned doing all this? I learned about the "Trivella", the curious tool that you use to open holes in the sand. And I also learned about the different uses that can be given to sand depending on whether it is wet or dry. Clearly there were other minor things that I learned in all this new work for me but those two were the most important and the ones that, from what they tell me, will help me a lot in future jobs that we do on the beach.
This work is already done, tomorrow we will start with other things to be able to open the beach for the summer season on time.
And I will continue taking photos and telling how things are going in the world of the Bagnini from Rimini.
Other chapters in this series