Europe’s most alluring spots become a playground for the new rich of the east

The beaches, resorts and assorted tourist attractions of Europe are undergoing a quiet revolution; a transformation to match the foreign-holiday boom unleashed by cheap package tours in the 1960s. The Russians are no longer coming. They have arrived. And the Chinese are on their way in even bigger numbers. With its pretty piazzas and ancient churches, Montecatini is a typical Tuscan town. But it is also one where the mayor has proposed that all street signs should be written in Russia's Cyrillic script, reflecting an unprecedented invasion of pleasure-seekers from the east. Across the rest of the continent, the picture is the same. Russians, Asians and Arabs are rewriting the rules of European tourism as newly enriched tycoons and middle-class beneficiaries of the world's booming economies buy properties and take up beach space once jealously guarded by northern Europeans. Outbound tourists from western Europe and the United States have remained fairly static in recent decades