ALL of Paris seemed to be en vacances, and the city belonged to the tourists; Rome was closed down for ferragósto, Italy's best-loved annual holiday; Bonn seemed a smaller town in Germany than ever. Where had all the Europeans gone? They had taken to the roads and beaches, turning the Riviera into an ever more delirious nightmare of traffic jams and suntan oil.
August, in short, is Europe's most grueling month, when by custom almost everyone on the Continent goes on vacation at the same time. If official estimates are to be believed, fully half of West Germany's 59 million people are away from their homes. More than 50% of these have left Germany for Austria, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia and other points south; 29 flights a week arrive in Majorca from Germany. Half of The Netherlands' 13 million people are out of their country. Some 22 million Frenchmen (46% of the population) continue to insist upon their August vacation despite government plaints that the country can no longer afford its annual month-long paralysis.
The number of Europeans on the road, on the rails or in the air this summer has reached a record 75 million, triple the level of 15 years ago. Largely because much of Europe was beset by the wettest and coldest July in a decade —the worst in France in 90 years—the hordes have been moving south to the Mediterranean in greater numbers and later in the summer than ever before.
This year's migration to the Med has already produced its own new Baedeker of unprecedented pollution, prices, crowding and—less trying of course —exposure of skin to sun (see map). Cost? A few venturesome Italians have discovered that a 15-day tour of Eastern Europe and Russia can be cheaper than two weeks at the messy beaches of Fregene, a popular resort near Rome. Pollution? The French have taken pains to clean up their beaches; however, the Mediterranean around Spain and some parts of Italy has become a mixture of urban and industrial effluents.
Crowds? On Ibiza, the neighbors of Hughes-Hoax Author Clifford Irving can blame him for making the island a household name; it has become so crowded that some travelers sleep in cars or on the roadsides. On the Greek island of Ios, police no longer allow the young knapsack-setters who arrive by the boatload every summer to camp on the beaches. Reason: there were so many kids and so few sanitary facilities that officials feared an outbreak of disease.
So far, however, only nudity has reached epidemic proportions. The monokini, which first appeared in St.-Tropez two years ago has spread this year to the beaches of tonier Antibes, Juan-les-Pins and Sardinia. By now the fad has become so familiar that Le Figaro's food critic has commented that "a breast leaning into a local salad is as removed from sexuality as a nose, an ear or a heel bone."