There are so many things
about living in Italy that can make you feel like you’re living in the middle
ages and I’m not just talking about the architecture (ba-dum bum).
When I first moved to Italy,
I didn’t have a washing machine. I know. I didn’t just move to the old country,
I moved to the last century.
After working 12 to 16 hours
a day, every day, in a pub/pizzeria in summer serving ice cold flavored vodka,
pizza and cheese burgers and washing piles of dishes, I’d lay down on the floor with my legs perpendicular
against the wall, drink a beer and watch the shooting stars off the balcony
before going to sleep knowing that the following day I’d have laundry to do.
When you’re sweating half your body weight in a pizza kitchen during the summer
in Italy, you always have laundry to do.
I’d haul the laundry into
the utility closet that had a sink with the little grooves on the sloped front and
wash our stinky clothes, our bath towels, our bedsheets by hand. Then I’d hang
them out on the line on the balcony to dry, hoping no birds would fly over
them.
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| My first Italian clothes dryer |
It got worse as the weather
got colder. I still had to hang everything outside or across some chairs in the
living room, but the house was
just as cold and damp as it was on the balcony. Besides having no washing
machine, we had no heat. The apartment did have a, um, heating system. It
required a fire to burn constantly in the living room fire place. This fire
could, in theory, heat up the water running thru the pipes that ran across it
which would then carry the hot water thru the apartment to the radiators. As
long as you were home all day to make sure the fire was going, you had heat. If
you had wood. And we didn’t. After washing, rinsing, wringing, repeating with
all our dirty clothes, I’d lug them outside and string ‘em up in the damp
mountain air, bundled up so I wouldn’t get hypothermia.
In December of that first
year, we moved to a different area and rented a furnished apartment while we looked for another
place that could hold all our furniture. This apartment had a washing machine,
but the heating situation was only slightly better than the first place. There
was a fireplace, but no pipe system, so unless you were standing directly in
front of it, a risk to both you and the furniture as there was no screen on it,
you were cold and your clothes still took days to dry outside.
I would put the laundry in
the washing machine, wait an hour and a half for it to be done and drape it all
over the cold, damp house. Three days, one hour and one half later, the laundry
would be done.
I started to notice that I
wasn’t the only one wearing my jeans and sweaters many times in a row. Some
people, I noticed, wore the same entire outfit for days on end. Med-i-e-val.
When we found the place
we’re currently in, I was delighted by several things. It could accommodate all
of our furniture. It had gas heat AND a pellet stove (much cheaper than gas).
It had a clothesline that was covered and it had a washing machine. It was thirty years old, but it was a washing
machine. It took three hours to complete one load of laundry.
Swish, swish. Wait. Swish,
swish. Wait.
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| This is what a 30 yr. old Italian washing machine looks like |
The other notable thing
about this washing machine is that it just had a dial with numbers. Nothing
about temperature. Nothing about speed. Just numbers and lines, like some sort
of timer. For laundry.
The first time I used it, I
noticed two things. One, there appeared to be steam rising up from it. Two, my
very expensive, fancy eggshell-colored underwear bought in my previous life
were now a very strange dark grey/purple color from either the lavender scarf that
is now half its original size or from the t-shirt with the photo of the Hong
Kong skyline that is now a dingy grey. It seems I had boiled my clothes. The
Italians thought this was hysterical. The Americana doesn’t know how to use a
washing machine. Didn’t I know that I had to push the button that looks like a
snowflake for cold water? I thought it was bizarre that my washing machine could
heat up the cold water that ran into it. How was I supposed to know?
One day, the machine just
stopped. The front loading washing machine just stopped mid-cycle, full of
water and clothes and would not move on to the centrifuge/extraction step.
Apparently, there was a filter that needed to be cleaned out periodically. Who
knew washing machines had filters? Of course, it was located a centimeter off
the floor and when opened, water would pour out of the machine.
The detergent dispenser was
broken, so I couldn’t put fabric softener in it at the beginning of the wash,
and besides, I had to keep checking to see that the filter didn’t need cleaning
(swish, swish, wait. wait. wait. swish) or worse, that it had just finally
given up and stopped working entirely. I would set the kitchen timer and cross
my fingers that I could run upstairs and dump the fabric softener down the
dispenser right as the water started to run through before the second rinse. If
I did a load of wash, I had to be sure I’d be home for the three hours it took
to do it and I had to start it at early enough at night to avoid the high day
time energy costs yet early enough to put in the fabric softener before falling
asleep. When I took the clothes out, they’d be sopping wet.
I’m not sure why, but after
three years, the landlord bought us a new washing machine. I am delighted. It
has a dial with words! They’re Italian words, but I get the gist. “Eco 20’”
must mean “energy efficient, 20’ water temperature”. It has a “hand wash”
cycle. There’s an option to do a “rapido” load in fifteen minutes. It has an
LED panel with buttons. One section has hours listed. One has centrifuge speed
and one has an iron. I think that last one is like a “fluff” cycle to make
ironing easier. I don’t know. I don’t iron. I don’t really care, either. I
don’t even care that the instruction booklet is in Italian only or that we
couldn’t find an English manual online or even find the brand being sold
anywhere but Italy and India. I have a washing machine that goes “swish, wait.
swish wait”, that I can set at 8pm to start at 2am and that I can dump my
fabric softener in right at the start. It still takes about an hour and a half
for a normal load of laundry and I still run the risk of accidentally boiling
my clothes if I’m not careful, but at least I’m not scrubbing my sheets in a
utility sink and when I take them out, they’re almost dry. Progress.
