Italian Toilets and Other Plumbing

Italian Plumbing

The peninsula of Italy has a long lavatorial history, what with the Romans and their obsessions with water. And, before them, the colonists of Greater Greece, what the Romans later called Magna Graecia.

A foreign visitor to Italy today probably won't be terribly surprised by what they find. But there are some distinctive Italian trends.

Bidets — Italy has the highest prevalence I've seen of standalone ceramic bidets. In lodging and homes, there very likely will be a ceramic bidet in the bathroom next to the toilet. If not, if there's no room because it's a tiny bathroom in a small apartment that someone is renting out, then there will be a hose with a spray nozzle or possibly a spray attachment to the toilet seat.

Seatless — Italy has a fairly high prevalence of seatless toilets. A fold-down seat makes it more difficult to keep a toilet clean, so public toilets frequently have none. Shared toilets in your accomodation may be seatless. Even private toilets en-suite within your accomodations might be seatless.

Ancient — Yes, there are ancient baths and drains and latrines to be seen within historic sites such as Pompeii and Paestum. But the modern city of Rome is filled with operating Roman-era fountains and many drains built by the Romans are still in operation.

Where does used toilet paper go? It depends. But if there's a trash bin near the toilet, place used toilet paper. Don't throw it into the toilet.

The official signature of the government of Republican Rome was SPQR, standing for Senatus Populusque Romanus or "The Senate and the People of Rome".

"SPQR" is now the motto of the city of Rome, and it appears on the city's coat of arms, many of its civic buildings, and its manhole covers.

The Bidet Situation

On my first visit to Italy, in 2009, I was briefly in Rome and then went north to Tuscany, Umbria, and the Cinque Terre area of Liguria. Here's an example of what I encountered in Rome, at the Fawlty Towers Hotel near the main train station. It's a well-supplied pair of toilet and raised bowl bidet:

The strong trend north of Rome at that time was for a bidet-like attachment to the seat or the bowl rim, or a hand-held spray nozzle on a hose.

This very nice bathroom at Albergo Anna in Perugia shows several common features of Italian bathroom design.

First, it doesn't take too much space as it is very efficiently put together. Maybe more so than you would expect, as the sink is almost in your lap when you sit on the toilet.

Second, there is not a separate bidet but there is a small sprayer on a flexible hose. Be careful not to bump its valve handle by accident! I had a few accidental random sprayings of my bathroom.

The design seemed to me to be overly complicated. There's a single-handle valve that lets you adjust both flow rate and temperature. It's mounted on the wall. The mixed water supply to the spray nozzle then exits the wall and travels up through a hole at the rear of the bowl rim, and the nozzle can then rest in a holder on the wall.

The tank is mounted high on the wall. It is flushed by pushing up on the plunger button. If you just need a small flush, you can pull that plunger back down and stop the flush at that point.

The light switch and electrical outlet are covered by a flexible transparent panel. You can turn the light on and off without raising the cover.

This toilet at Hotel Acquaverde in Genova has a bidet system built into its seat.

The rather small ball-and-knob control adjusts flow and temperature. Up to start and increase flow, left for hot and right for cold. Of course, I doubt that you really want either hot or cold, you want some pleasant temperature in between. That's why it's made to allow temperature adjustments!

Let's virtually visit those bathrooms in the order I encountered them. First, B&B Miraglia in the centro storico, the center of the old city, in Napoli:

Casa Vacanza Nina in Salerno was a small apartment — just a narrow entryway from the staircase in an old building, a bedroom almost filled by the double bed, and a small bathroom.

The apartment had its own water heater, a small unit up by the ceiling above the toilet.

La Dimora del Merchese Notarbatrolo in Palermo was in a palazzo, literally a palace with a historical plaque by the outer door!

B&B Caravello in Milazzo was just an overnight stop.

Hotel Al Togo on Vulcano, a small volcanic island that's the origin of "volcano" and related words:

As I frequently found in Italy, there was a small step up into the bathroom in order to provide more sub-floor space for the drains. There was a small drop on the inside edge of the threshold, so that if you did manage to flood the bathroom floor, it probably would go down the drain in that floor rather than pouring out into the other room.

Pedra Residence on Stromboli:

The single-lever controls on the sink and bidet had nice long handles. That's a good design as it makes it much easier for people with hand or wrist weakness.

Again, the water heater was up by the ceiling.

Hotel Touring in Messina is an older hotel just a block from the train station:

I Mori Taormina was a small apartment in Taormina. No bidet but a nice shattaf or spray nozzle with flow and temperature control.

Sorry, shattaf is the Arabic word, while the Turkish is taharet musluğu literally meaning "bidet faucet". However, I don't know of any specific English term for the device.

Anna's Residence in Siracusa was a compact loft apartment with a spacious bathroom:

Persefone Luxury Suite in Agrigento was an en-suite private room within what had been a large apartment, renovated into a five room hotel:

Papillon BnB in Palermo was a large apartment renovated into a six-room hotel with two shared bathrooms. Here's one of them:

Guesthouse Pitagora in Rome was a guesthouse filling the next-to-top floor of an apartment building:

Ancient Italian Toilets — Paestum

The Temple of Hera is visible beyond the 25×10 meter swimming pool at an elite home in Paestum, a Greek colony south of Salerno.

One of the city's principal sewer drain lines exits the city alongside Porta Giustizia, the city's southern gate.

Many more pictures and historical details are included on the dedicated Paestum page.

Ancient Italian Toilets — Pompeii

Pompeii
Plumbing

If you are interested in historical toilets, you will want to see the toilets and other plumbing of Pompeii. This is the indoor toilet from the famous two-story brothel, the Lupanaro.

Ancient Italian Toilets — Roman Senate Latrines

Roman
Senate
Latrine

Some Italian toilets are quite old. These are the public latrines next to Pompey's portico in Rome. This portico was used for meetings of the Roman Senate. This is where Julius Caesar was assassinated on 15 March 44 BC.

I have a whole page featuring these ancient latrines.

Ancient Plumbing — Springs and Drains in Subterranean Mithraic Temples

Mithraism or the Cult of Mithras was a Roman mystery religion that became very popular throughout the western Roman Empire from the 1st to 4th centuries CE, especially within the Imperial Roman Army. Mithraism had many parallels to early Christianity, and the two religions became rivals.

Mithraism was always a mystery cult, the Mithraic Mysteries. It had no written scriptures, and all traditions and rituals were passed verbally to the new members. So, we don't know much about it.

A Mithareum or Mithraic temple was built underground, to be completely out of the sight of the uninitiated. Fresh water was required for some Mithraic rituals, and there are typically both springs and drains near one, like this example near the Colosseum in Rome.

See the dedicated page for much more on a Mithraeum and its springs and drains.

Ancient Drains — Cloacina, the Goddess of the Sewer, and the Cloaca Maxima

Cloacina was the Roman goddess of sewers, simultaneously the goddess of filth and the goddess of beauty. She is named for cloaca, the Latin for sewer or drain. Remains of a shrine to her can still be today seen in the Forum in Rome, where she watched over the Cloaca Maxima or the Great Sewer. The Romans, who seem never to have had an original religious thought, picked her up from the Etruscans. See the dedicated page for much more on Cloacina and the Cloaca Maxima.

Heads in Italian Ships

I traveled both directions between Napoli and Palermo on board overnight ferries of the GNV line. A private cabin with its own head was just € 89.27 in one direction and € 103.27 in the other. I felt that that was a very reasonable price for those accommodations on a roughly 12-hour voyage.

Here's the interior of my cabin on the first run, from Napoli to Sicily. The far door opens into the passageway. The red compartment at right is my cabin's head. Hatchways on board ships generally don't extend all the way down to the deck. You need to step up and through the hatch.

And, below shows the return from Palermo to Napoli. The shower spaces in both cases were quite small, but they got the job done.

This toilet was on board a high-speed ferry connecting Milazzo, on Sicily, to the Aeolian islands including Vulcano and Stromboli:

Italian Train Toilets

The Italian rail system is excellent. The top line is the Frecciarossa or the "Red Arrow" express, which operates at speeds up to 300 km/h. Salerno is the southern end of the Frecciarossa, it runs north through Napoli to Rome, and then on to multiple areas in the north. The toilet compartments resemble the systems on board airliners.

The Regionale trains are also quite nice. This toilet on board an inter-city Regionale train between Firenze and Pisa is modern, clean, and it has a holding tank.

One change from 2009 to 2025 was that handicapped accessible toilets became even more common. They need much more space, so you might find that only every second or every third toilet compartment on a train is accessible, but there will be one fairly close. Here's the toilet in a much more spacious accessible compartment on board a Regionale.

The simpler toilets below are on board a regional train running along the coast from La Spezia through the beautiful Cinque Terre coastal region.

There's no holding tank, just a simple drop right onto the tracks, but it's reasonably functional. Notice that you're supposed to have to press the level with your foot to open the drop onto the track and release flushing water, as seen in the second picture. But as you see in the first picture, these often were always open from the bowl straight down to the track. That can cause a problem, as described below.

These pictures of simple toilets without holding tanks are from my 2009 trip. Here's one of those trains exiting a tunnel in the Cinque Terre area. I believe that the same design of train was still in operation in 2025, but I can't be certain.

This is the worst train toilet I have ever encountered. It was on a regional Italian train out of Firenze.

It looks ordinary — a simple drop straight onto the track, much like what you see just above. The slightly different seat design appears to be the only difference. Oh, if only that had been true....

I took this picture before using the toilet, and I was the first person to use it after the train had been sitting in the station for quite a while before starting our journey. So, things were reasonably clean. The drain pipe had dried, a crucial aspect of what was to come. We were then moving at full speed for this regional train, maybe about 100 km/h.

The drain pipe is supposed to use the Bernoulli effect to draw air down the pipe like a chimney, pulling waste and air down the toilet, out of the compartment, and onto the tracks.

The problem was that this one was forcing air up the pipe, with an effect that you can probably imagine but might prefer not to.

Full speed operation forced a very brisk air flow up the pipe. The result was a high-speed urine fountain. Closing the seat and lid just slightly changed the direction of flow — rather than spraying straight up, it now came out horizontally about knee high. The high air speed made for very fine droplets that more easily stayed airborne.

By the time we got into the next city, the interior of the toilet compartment had been coated in a fine mist of urine. It was a fairly long trip, people had had to use it and recharge the fountain.

In Case Of Urgency

There are public toilets in Italy. More, and in better shape, than you find in the U.S. Here's an example in Salerno:

You will probably have to pay to use a public toilet. Here's a ticket from the public facilities outside the lower station of the funicular railway leading up to Orvieto, in southwestern Umbria. This is from my 2009 trip. By 2025, you could pay by tapping a credit card at most public toilets.

Otherwise, buy coffee or gelato or an Aperol spritz at a café or bar and use theirs. The first one here, in Agrigento, has a sign in both Italian and English asking you to put your used toilet paper into the trash bin, not down the toilet.

Toilet in a café in Agrigento.

Toilet in a café near the entrance to Paestum.

Toilet in a café in Napoli.

Toilet in a café in Rome. The sign says "I'm not saying to do it in the center but at least do it inside."

Toilet in a café in Salerno.

Toilet in a café in Salerno.

Toilet in a café in Salerno.

Fountains

The ancient Romans loved water, and they were quite good at hydraulic engineering. Water from many springs outside Rome, some at quite a distance, were brought into the city via large aquaducts.

Fresh cool water still flows constantly from the many fountains in Rome. Hot visitors can refill their water bottles, or wash their hands when they're sticky with gelato, or wash their feet, or whatever.

The first example is from the Trastavere district of Rome, west of the Tiber.

In the pictures above and below, I am demonstrating the ease of refilling your water bottle with cold, clean water at a constantly flowing fountain near the Colosseum.

Above is a fountain one door down the street from where I stayed in Rome.

Below is a fountain not too far from the subterranean Temple of the Mithraic Mysteries, which in turn is close to the Colosseum.

It's not just Rome. The last picture above is from Siena, another Italian city with lots of fountains supplied by aquaducts and tunnels bearing water from mountain springs in the region.

The rather ornate fountain below is along Via Condotti in Rome, near the headquarters of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. What is S.M.O.M.? It is a holdover from the Crusades, retaining claims of sovereignty and with permanent observer status at the U.N. It is still an important provider of first aid training and emergency medical services in many countries, including Ireland, Germany, and France, and it runs medical relief missions world-wide.

The order operated from Rhodes 1310-1523 and from Malta 1530-1798. Then Napoleon captured Malta in 1798 and France took over.

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Now the SMOM has some headquarters buildings in Rome granted with extraterritoriality status.

They operated hospital trains in both World Wars. 36 military aircraft were transferred from the Italian Airforce to SMOM in the peace treaty ending World War II. One is now in a museum, the other 35 of those have been retired, but the order still operates some aircraft bearing the military insignia of the military order.

Et cetera

Papal Toilets

The Vatican, with Saint Peter's Basilica, is yet another extraterritorial place within Italy.

Here is one of the toilets in the Vatican Museums.

The page dedicated to Papal Toilets has more pictures and more details, including a toilet at another Papal basilica.

I have noticed floor-mounted water control pedals at public toilets at cafés and bars in both Italy and France. Here's an example from the island of Vulcano.

Here's a toilet at the archaeological park in Siracusa, on Sicily. Then, a toilet at a truck stop along the main motorway between Siena and Firenze. It's cleaner than what I would expect to find in the U.S.

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Finally, the laundry of the convent associated with the large Church of Saint Catherine of Alexandria in the center of the old city of Palermo. Many large tanks!

The convent laundry made me think of a sword fight scene set in a laundry in The Three Musketeers. The real movie, from 1973, with the screenplay by the brilliant George MacDonald Fraser, not the inferior remakes.