Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Tubs and Toilets
I feel obliged to begin with a public service announcement: if you haven't yet traveled to
Italy, please be careful the first time you step into an elegant Italian bathtub! They are de-
signed for beauty, not for safety. The sweeping curvature of the bottom of an Italian design-
er tub is ever-so-much more lovely than the broad, flat base of an American tub. The only
drawback is that there is no place to stand where you are not on an extremely slippery slope.
Needless to say, there are never any traction strips or anti-skid striations since these would
interfere with the cleanness of line and the overall elegance of the impression. It all makes
you wonder sometimes whether the government allows such things as part of a strategy to
weed out the elderly from the population and save on long-term care.
Moving on to toilets… Please note that in Italy, as in England and France, the word “toilet”
is not a dirty word. It sounds to foreign ears in these countries about the same way that the
word, “bathroom”, sounds to Americans. The French, with their remarkable gift for eleg-
ance, eventurn“toilet water” intosomething classy.InAmerican English, ontheotherhand,
the word, “toilet”, turned nasty somewhere along the way, and we almost need to spit after
we say it.
In Italian, toiletta refers to the room but not to the toilet fixture itself, which is called a
water —pronounced “vah-ter”. The Italians clearly derived this name from WC, aka Water
Closet. Although it doesn't make any sense to call a toilet a water , it's probably too late to
do much about it. (The Italians probably feel the same way about us calling a photograph
machine a “camera”. We lifted the term from the original darkroom, the camera obscura,
which was the precursor to our modern cameras.)
In Italy the toilet is still a work in progress. Much like its neighbor, the bathtub, it is long
on elegance and short on common-sense functionality. There are a remarkable variety of
designs, but they all fail to function as well as the lowliest, garden-variety American toi-
let. Somehow American engineering quickly figured out that the best option was to fill the
bowl with water so that, when you flush, the waste is carried off and that's that. The Italian
toilet typically offers a broad expanse of stylishly curved porcelain but has only a tiny area
of water. The absurdity of the design transforms the act of elimination into a form of target
practice. Of course, it's almost impossible to make a bulls-eye every time. Well, that's why
Italians provide those long-handled plastic scrub brushes tucked away next to every toilet.
How convenient!
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