Italigram #1: The Bathrooms

I was briefly back from holiday in Italy but am on my way over the Pond again, this time to Spain on business. While I’m in the air, I’m writing the first of an undetermined number of entries on the Italian experience. Since I’m lacking the creativity to make this a narrative, here's a list:

Four things you never knew you needed to know about Italian bathrooms:

1. Showers
Mirroring the rest of your accommodations, bathrooms in Italian hotels are usually efficiently small. Even more so the shower. I believe our bath in Varenna was the prototype for the rest of the country. It had a two foot-by-two foot shower with a plastic shower curtain designed to cling to you like Glad Wrap on leftovers. All the showers are equipped with a pull-chain that, if pulled, tells the front desk LifeAlert-style that you’ve fallen and can’t get up (in Italian I’d guess). But because the chains are either errantly pulled by unknowing guests or used as laundry lines, almost every one of them is tied off to the shower rod, making it impossible to reach if you actually fall. Which is extremely likely as the porcelain that lines the floors of all Italian bathrooms is impregnated with Teflon, coated with pig fat and waxed to a friction-free shine. And then you get it wet.

2. The Bidet
The bidet is perhaps the greatest invention of all time, and, like football (aka soccer), it has inexplicably never caught on in America. People don’t like to talk about these things, but the truth is that many times when you go number two little pooplets, or Klingons, stick to the hairs of your butthole (don’t recoil with shock, it happens to everyone). Like a fire hydrant on a hot day, the bidet gently blasts away these little shitlings, leaving the citizens of Taintville feeling clean and refreshed. Ahhh.


3. The Squater
Even in remotely located toilettes, automation is standard when it comes to the faucet, soap dispensers and hand dryers. Get your mitts within three feet (1.7 meters) of these apparati and you get squirted, glopped or blown, respectively. All of which makes the fact that they still have the stand-and-deliver—AKA Turkish—toilet in fairly high use, even more ironic. “We can deliver an effortless hand cleansing experience, but your gonna have to do a quad-burning Roman chair to pinch a loaf.”


4. The Floor Flusher
Nearly as ingenious as the bidet and actually much more practical is the use of floor pedals to actuate the flushing of toilets (and, where it’s not sensor-activated, to turn on the water to wash your hands). Truth-to-tell, I almost always use my foot to flush in public restrooms. I’m not a germophobe or anything, but I really don’t want someone’s poop on my hands—even if I’m gonna wash them in a minute. In many Italian restrooms there are either car-style pedals or what look like half-raquetballs on the floor that you tap with your foot to flush. I may still have poopey fingers from wiping, but at least they’re MY poopy fingers. And it’s just for a minute till I wash. And it’s my poop. Poopey poop poop. Poop.