The structure inside the toilet of my hotel in Arezzo, Italy

I saw a lot of interesting bathrooms and toilets in Europe. I especially loved the ones on the top floor where you could lie in the tub and see the beautiful blue sky by day and the stars by night through the skylight a couple of feet above you.

In a lot of houses in the Czech Republic, France and the Netherlands, the bathroom and the toilet are separate rooms. But the loo talk I will indulge in the following lines concerns Italy.

The bathroom and the toilet are in a single room in this beautiful country. But an alien (to me) structure in all Italian bathrooms had me thinking since I couldn’t for the life of me think what it could be for.

It looked very much like a regular western toilet. But it certainly was not, because there was already one there.

The only difference was the opening through which the water drained out, which was like that of a washbasin. It did not have a cover like a toilet, but had a tap attached to it.

When I was in Rome, I had to do a bit of laundry. So, I asked the friend I was staying with if I could do the washing in it.

“No! Take this tub,” she said and gave me one.

A few days after this, my Canadian friend Caitlin and I were travelling in Tuscany together. We stayed at a hotel in Arezzo and our loo had this structure as well. So I decided to ask her.

“Hey Cait, I’m sure this is a very silly question, but can you tell me what that is?” I asked, pointing to it.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you the same thing,” she said with a grin.

We had a neighbour at the hotel. She was a research scholar from Milan called Bianca and was in Arezzo for some work at the local university. We decided to ask her because she’s Italian and we assumed she’d know all about it.

So, the next time we met in the drawing room of our bed-and-breakfast, I went to her.

“Hi! Could you please tell us what this thing in the loo is used for?”

She couldn’t suppress a smile.

“Well, it’s used to wash your er... pubes,” she said and explained to us that you could either half squat on it facing the tap or otherwise and used the water from the tap to wash.

“Oh okay!” That was both me and Cait.

To think I wanted to do my laundry in it...