Fontane Bianche’s real turning point came after the Second World War, when the place stopped being a rural strip of coast and started becoming a summer address for Siracusa’s middle and upper classes. Before that shift, the beach sat beside masserie, vineyards for Moscato di Siracusa, and a seventeenth-century tuna fishery in the gulf; the coastline was defined less by leisure than by work, water, and land use. Then, in the years of the economic and building boom, villas began to spread along the shore, and by the 1960s and 1970s Fontane Bianche was being chosen for second homes and holiday structures by people from Siracusa and nearby towns.

That change matters because the beach’s identity was not invented all at once; it was built by ordinary postwar habits, especially the desire to own a place at the sea. The name still points to the springs that give the place its “white fountains” reputation, and the old layering of coast and settlement remains visible in the awkward mix of shoreline, low houses, and scattered villas. What a visitor still sees today is that same long beach, but framed by the holiday landscape the boom years left behind.