The sudden passing of Roberto Santini, manager and soul of Bagno Piero in Forte dei Marmi, has saddened all those who had the fortune to know Italy’s most renowned beach establishment entrepreneur, a true beacon for the industry. Roberto was a person capable of building positive relationships with everyone, as demonstrated by thousands of memories we have read, since yesterday morning, on social media and in interviews. We received one particular memory that we want to share with our readers. It is from Francesco Scardino, manager of Lido Baiadera in Oliveri (Messina), who told us a beautiful and inspiring story linked to his beginnings and the benefit he received, indirectly, from Bagno Piero and from Roberto.

We publish here, in full, his memory.

“There are people who do business and people who, through their own work, end up becoming an example even for those who live and work hundreds of kilometers away.

Roberto Santini, owner of Bagno Piero in Forte dei Marmi, was one of these people for us.

The news of his passing deeply saddens us and takes us back in time, to 1997, when the story of Lido Baiadèra in Oliveri, Sicily, was just beginning.

We were at the beginning. We had few resources, countless dreams and that healthy recklessness that serves when you decide to build something starting from almost nothing.

We needed to buy the first sunbeds for our beach and, through a Messina retailer, we managed to purchase used sunbeds. They were secondhand, but they meant so much to us.

On their backrest there was still a sign: “Bagno Piero”.

Those sunbeds came from Forte dei Marmi, from an establishment that for those who did our profession already represented a reference point. We were a very small Sicilian reality taking its first steps in the beach business, but we were incredibly proud even of the little we had.

You had to start somewhere.

And we, unknowingly, also began from a small piece of Bagno Piero’s story.

Years have passed. We worked, made mistakes, learned, invested, made sacrifices and continued to believe in our idea of hospitality and tourism. That small Lido Baiadèra of 1997 grew and became, with pride, a recognized and appreciated reality.

Then, in 2025, life gave me one of those encounters capable of ideally closing a circle.

In Milan, on the occasion of the award ceremony dedicated to the best Beach Clubs in Italy, I met Roberto Santini.

I asked him for a photo together.

But above all I felt the need to tell him that story.

I told him about Oliveri, about Sicily, our beginning in 1997, the limited economic resources we had and those secondhand sunbeds with the “Bagno Piero” sign on the backrest.

I told him that, while we were building our small dream, realities like his represented for us an example of how one could interpret beach business not simply as a service, but as a culture of hospitality, style, identity and tourism.

That photograph today inevitably assumes an even greater significance.

Because it tells the distance between that 1997 and that 2025. It tells a journey. And above all, it tells how important examples can be in the life of those who decide to undertake a path.

Roberto Santini belongs to the history of Italian beach tourism.

He represented a way of doing this profession that left a mark, contributing to building that culture of Italian beach hospitality that many of us still try, each with our own identity and in our own land, to carry forward.

From Oliveri, from our Sicily, today we simply want to say thank you.

Thank you for being, even without knowing it, part of a small piece of our story.

Those old sunbeds with “Bagno Piero” written on them could have been just used sunbeds for someone.

For us, in 1997, they were the beginning of a dream.

And perhaps that is precisely the most beautiful legacy that someone who has done their profession well for a lifetime can leave: to become a reference for people you may not know, to inspire those who come after and to leave something that continues to live even when time passes.

To the Santini family and to the entire great family of Bagno Piero, our closeness and our most sincere condolences.

Roberto Santini will remain in the history of Italian beach and tourism business.

We, at Lido Baiadèra, will also remember him this way: thinking of those sunbeds from 1997, our small beach in Oliveri, our first steps and that name written on the backrest that, many years later, I would have the honor of telling personally to the man who had written its history.

With affection, respect and gratitude.

Francesco Scardino, Lido Baiadèra, Oliveri (Me)