"This is everyone's beach. Not for those who come and set up their umbrellas as they please. Now get them back." An insult follows. A twenty-six-second video shows him leaving the beach gear of a small group of tourists in the bins. They have toured Italy and transformed Claudio Stangoni, 51, from Siniscola, into a champion of the rules of civilized living on Sardinia's beaches.

What did he do? "My duty," he says. Namely, removing the beach umbrellas left overnight on the sands of Siniscola by some people who thought they could grab a portion of the coastline, as if it were theirs and rightfully theirs.
Stangoni isn't a lifeguard or an environmental officer: "I'm just a beach user who loves his land." A worker, he often goes to La Caletta for a walk early in the morning with a friend. "And those umbrellas were already there two days earlier. The next day, we passed by the group: they were tourists, aged between 40 and 50. They were also complaining about the seagrass on the sand."

Then another walk. And everything was still there: " The beach cleaning machine, which we pay for, had to slalom around. I couldn't see anymore," he says. He uprooted the umbrellas while a friend filmed. And he threw them at the bottom of the trash bins.

The video capturing the scene exploded on various social media: "I'd like to get a message across: we welcome tourists with open arms," Stangoni emphasizes, "but there are rules to follow." Reactions to his civic resistance? "Some tourists wrote to me that if they weren't here, we'd starve. Another wrote that if I did that with his umbrella, he'd burn my car. Let's forget it."

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