Italians ask not if you’ll be taking a summer vacation but when. They make two things clear about summer vacation: 1) you should probably consider leaving your job if it doesn’t entitle you to at least a ten-day break and 2) forget the mountains: you’d be nuts not to spend it at the seaside.

Many of the scenes witnessed at Italian beaches are an education in the customs of the country better than any guidebook preparation. Going to the beach in August in Italy can be like attending a Moroccan bazaar. Hot, crowded, noisy and a venue for bartering, the Italian beach experience detours drastically from the one splashed on glossy pages of travel magazines with clones of Sophia Loren sipping Campari in Capri.

These days, some Italian beaches host water-gun games where the amunition isn’t Evian but Moet Chandon. Forget the flutes, just aim and slurp. To work off the buzz, aerobics instructors in surfer shorts shimmy, shake and samba to crowds of bronzed followers while speakers blare DeeJay music set up on a loungechair. An enthusiastic interpretation of the record hit “YMCA” left a boxomy teenager without coverage and with several dinner proposals. Postage stamp bikinis cover little of what they should, challenging Brazilian fashion and making American bathing suits look like diapers. A clothesrack of batiked sarongs, button-down cover-ups, and two piece suits walks down the beach by itself. On occasion, a pair of feet reveal themselves connected to the Moroccan salesman carrying the merchandise on his shoulder as if he knicked it from the third floor of Rinascente. Slushy granite are offered out of pushcarts, and leafy coconut pops out of blue buckets, swinging from the elbows of rowdy salesmen straight off the local trains from Rome.

The expression for swimming in Italian — fare un bagno – reflects exactly how Italians cool off. They float in the waves as if in the bath tub — a lap to the buoy and back is often out of the question. Foreigners are spotted from miles away as those plunging in the water right after having eaten and without splashing their tummies with a sprinkling of water to avoid indigestion or temperature shock. Mammas shake their heads, tsk their tongues, and glance at their watch to see how far along they must wait until the big hand makes its way past the hour-long interval between the panino and the plunge.

The most popular read on the beach is rarely a book but either Le Parole Incrociate or a cellphone (and its text messages).

My husband gasped when I told him, seaside, that I craved a hamburger and fries, the most American summer lunch to be had on the beach. How could I possibly not want fish? Or not resist a plate of spaghetti alle vongole under an ombrellone? Well, probably because in Maine or Martha’s Vineyard, where I spent my summers as a child, the only fish we were offered as an option was a fishstick with ketchup. The fact that my mouth still waters thinking about it enrages my husband. Fruit, salads, and vegetables garnish many beachstands in Italy and must help contribute to the lean and lithe legs parading the dunes. I surely could have substituted a few plates of them for the countless hotdogs and hamburgers I devoured as a child.

But some summer temptations never cease to leave our cultural palette.