Blue Flags 2026: 257 towns, region by region

Italy holds 257¹ Blue Flag municipalities in 2026, covering 525¹ beaches and 87 marinas, and Liguria leads the table with 35 towns ahead of Puglia and Calabria on 27 each.

The criterion: 33 boxes ticked, not a beauty contest

The Blue Flag is awarded by the FEE against 33 criteria grouped in four areas: bathing water quality, environmental education and information, land and environment management, and services and safety. Nothing on that list rates how the beach looks.

That is the reason this ranking exists on a site that refuses most beach rankings. Every other "best beaches in Italy" list is an editor's taste; this one is a checklist somebody had to pass. It also means the award attaches to a municipality and its whole shoreline management, so a flagged town can contain a scruffy corner and an unflagged one a fine beach.

The 2026 round was the 40th edition of the program, announced in May 2026, and from this edition the certification runs for two years instead of one.

The table: 257 towns across 18 regions

Liguria took 35 flags in 2026, more than any other region.

Read the table against a map and two things stand out. Liguria packs 35 flags into a single narrow strip of coast, while Sicily and Sardinia, two islands, take 16 and 17 between their whole shorelines. And Calabria, which almost never appears in an English-language beach list, ties for second place on 27.

Twelve flags in a region with no sea

Trentino-Alto Adige holds 12 Blue Flags in 2026, Lombardy 4 and Piedmont 4, and none of those three regions touches the sea. Their flags fly on lake shores, which the program covers on the same terms as the coast.

This is the line the national table gets misread on. Sort regions by flag count for a sea holiday and you will be sent inland: Trentino-Alto Adige outranks Emilia-Romagna, Lazio and Veneto without owning a beach. Limone sul Garda, one of the 14 new entries in 2026, is a lake town.

What moved in 2026: 14 in, 3 out

Fourteen municipalities entered the list in 2026 and three left it, for a net gain of 11 towns over 2025. The named newcomers are Rimini, Limone sul Garda, Monte Argentario, Lipari, Ispica and Teulada; the published list of new entries is partial, so those six are examples rather than the full set.

The three that were not reconfirmed are San Felice Circeo, Patù and Castrignano del Capo. Losing a flag does not mean the water failed a test: any of the 33 criteria, including services and management, can end a run.

Rimini is the name to notice among the newcomers, because it is the Adriatic resort most English-speaking visitors have already heard of, and it arrives in a region that holds 11 flags in total.

What the flag does not tell you

A Blue Flag says nothing about crowding, parking, shade, seabed, currents or whether the beach is free or run by concessions. Those are the four things that actually decide a beach day in July, and none of them is in the 33 criteria.

Use it as a floor, not as a recommendation: it tells you the water was tested and the town has lifeguards and a plan. For the rules on what you can do in the water, the relevant document is the zoning of the marine protected areas, which is a different system entirely.

↑ Contents