Magical Mystery-Loo Tour (aka “To-Da-Loo”)

A portion of this post appeared in a travel piece I wrote in 2011.  However, this post places a heavier emphasis on the culture shock we encountered with the Italian public gabinetto.  At the end of this post, I included a link to the original post entitled La Dolce Vita.

After a nine-hour flight out of JFK on Alitalia, it wasn’t long before we experienced our first bit of culture shock courtesy of Milano, Italy.  It was nothing either of us ever expected to encounter.  There was no mention of this in our guidebooks or in our painstaking research before we embarked on a month-long trip that took us from Switzerland to Calabria, and hit all the major Italian cities in between (Venezia, Verona, Milano, Firenze, Bologna, Napoli, Sorrento, Capri, Roma, Pisa, and Calabria). 

 

After admiring Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous fresco The Last Supper on a wall in the Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie (before its restoration), we had our first encounter with the Italian public gabinetto (toilet). 

 

Upon walking through the door to the bathroom, we realized that the only thing separating man from woman was a sole stall door.  Not only was it a uni-sex bathroom, but both sexes utilized it simultaneously!  Certainly not for the weak of heart.

 

On display within each separate stall was a lone hole in the center of the floor, as if it was a masterpiece to be admired first from afar and then right up close, as one would admire the fresco right outside the door.

 

The hole had an unexpected, interesting porcelain edging around it, perhaps to provide a more aesthetic appeal.  There was no need for a gender-specific toilet or urinal, men stood and aimed with pinpoint precision into the target, while women squatted right over the hole and hoped to shoot straight into the hole beneath.  How economical the Italians are! This was certainly the epitome of a uni-sex toilet if I had ever seen one.

 

As bad as I needed to relieve myself at that moment, I was physically unable to squat that low to the floor without falling over, nor conjure up any inspiration to tinkle with the sound of a strange male voice on the other side of the stall (speaking in German or Japanese no less!).

Little did we know that this would be the first of our many adventures with the Italian “loo”!

 

In our hotel in Venezia (Venice) along the Grand Canal, the hot and cold water knobs weren’t even located inside the shower stall.  In order to adjust the temperature of the water, you had to physically exit the shower, walk over to the knobs on the opposite side of the room, adjust each knob, run back and step back into the shower to test the temperature, and repeat all steps until the perfect temperature was reached.  Never mind freezing your ass off between each trip to and fro the knobs.  I am not sure how non-Italian speaking guests managed, but it certainly helped to be aware that the “C” knob did not denote cold, but rather caldo (hot).  The knob labeled “F” stood for freddo (cold). 

 

Every time I used that shower, I had to rewire my brain from English to Italian first and remember this difference, so I didn’t scald myself.   Sometimes this was hard to do on very little sleep.  We couldn’t figure out for the life of us why the shower knobs weren’t inside the shower, other than perhaps the showers were added as an after-thought at some point in history, and perhaps it was more economical to add the plumbing on that particular side of the room.

 

In our hotel in Firenze (Florence), which decided if and when to turn on the master control for the air conditioning system to the entire hotel (during the hottest month of the year in Italy mind you), our bathtub did not have a curtain.  With one hand occupied with the hand-held showerhead at an angle to clean everything while not spewing water all over the bathroom, it was a bit of a juggling act and a bit of a comedy scene.

In the town of Agropoli, at the house of my boyfriend’s cugino (cousin), there was no separation of the shower from the rest of the bathroom.  The showerhead literally extended out of the ceiling in the middle of the room.  The tile floor slanted towards the center of the room, so that the water would run inward and down the drain in the middle of the floor, allowing the floor to dry itself.  You would literally stand in the middle of the room while the water sprayed everywhere.  Another oddity to me.  What was also interesting in this particular house, was the house wasn’t actually his cousin’s house.  During the month of August, the country literally goes on vacation.  People swap houses and live somewhere else for a month.  I have no idea whose house we were actually in.

In the town of Calabria, we stayed at the house of my boyfriend’s Nonna, which also happened to be the childhood home of his mother and her many siblings.  In this bathroom, the tub stood in the middle of the room, again with no curtain and a hand-held showerhead.  However, this one had an interesting addition that its predecessors didn’t; a window on the bathroom door!  Again, no curtain! The Italian way didn’t cease to amaze me. Luckily, this was the last stop on our magical mystery-loo tour, especially because his Nonna wouldn’t let us sleep in the same bed at least under her roof; I mean we weren’t married and we were Catholic, god forbid.  I drank a lot of Limoncello that visit. 

As old, charming and breathtaking the landscape, architecture and the cities of Italy were, when we landed in New York, I, like Dorothy Gale, felt there was no place like home.  

Non posso aspettare per la mia visita di ricambio al Italia.   :)

 

To read the original version of the travel post entitled La Dolce Vita (from which parts of this post were excerpted), click here.