Rome, Barcelona ... where'll be next on the young Brits' party circuit? Photograph: Inacio Rosa/EPA
Intriguing news from Rome, where tourists are reported to be running amok - drinking until all hours, dancing in fountains, acting the eejit and upsetting the locals.
But what sort of tourists are these drunken mayhem-makers? Rome's deputy mayor, Maria Pia Garavaglia, is helpfully specific - they're all from the US and the UK.
Eh? When did you last see a lagered-up American in replica Man U top being sick over his Converse trainers? Come, come, Ms Garavaglia, let's not beat about the bush here. Let's play the blame game properly. These drunken barbarians who're invading the Eternal City - you're talking about Brits and only Brits, aren't you? More accurately, you're talking about young Brits in replica football tops or T-shirts advertising the stag weekend. The ones who have begun to arrive in Rome by the thousand, since the growth of cheap flights to the Italian capital - now arriving at Ciampino airport at the rate of up to 14-a-day from Britain.
Meanwhile, over in Barcelona, controversy is raging over an attempt by the chic and venerable Boadas cocktail bar to ban customers wearing the wrong sort of clothes - ie, not dressed up like your average Catalan in slacks and tasseled loafers with optional sunspecs resting on top of the hair and non-optional pastel-coloured cashmere sweater slung over the shoulders.
T-shirts and baggy shorts are the offending signifiers of the kind of loutish, "low-quality" (ie British) tourists the Boadas bar doesn't want to have sampling its cocktails.
Alas, this attempt to discriminate on grounds of taste has fallen foul of Spanish law, which protects the fundamental human right of young red-faced British men dressed in identikit stag-party T-shirts to enter whichever Barcelonan cocktail bars they please.
The development is clearly not without controversy or collateral damage, but how heartening it is to learn that our boisterously high-spirited British youth - whose amusing antics have done so much to endear themselves to the locals of Amsterdam, Prague, Dublin, Tallinn and just about every Mediterranean resort outside the French Riviera and Libya - are now venturing even further afield for their stag parties and mini-breaks.
Rome? Barcelona? These were the places for trend-setting weekenders in the 90s. It took a good 20 years for the Costa del Sol to develop from the little fishing villages beloved by the chic and starry - your Sinatras, your Lorens - into the popular package-holiday destination for the unrich and non-famous. Now the whole process has accelerated, taking a mere 10 years for a destination to move from Wallpaper to Nuts.
So where'll be next on the young Brits' party circuit? Rome, Barcelona ... It's got to be Bilbao, hasn't it? Marvellous news for that city's beleaguered lap-dancing industry and all local suppliers of San Miguel and plastic breasts. Just think of the boost that our young ambassadors will give to that city's economy. Plus the bonus of a lively party atmosphere every Saturday night. Hooray for us.
· Harry Ritchie is the author of Here We Go, A Summer on the Costa Del Sol, among other books.
