Every summer arrives with its lists of the most beautiful this and the loveliest that, but most of them we have forgotten by the time we shake the sand out of our towels. This year, though, one may linger a little longer here in Italy, and for a happy reason: among the ten most beautiful beaches in Europe for 2026, chosen by the travel organization European Best Destinations, there was a single Italian name, and it belonged to a place that even many Ligurians tend to drive straight past on the way to somewhere more famous.
Bogliasco, a little gathering of pastel houses around a small harbor just southeast of Genoa, came in fifth. Not bad at all, if you consider that the rest of the list was practically a celebration of Greece, with the very top spot going to a long golden beach down in the Portuguese Algarve.
