Adventures in plumbing

Last month, not long after we arrived in Fidenza, our toilet started running. Not just a discreet dribble, but a loud and semi-permanent flush. Usually you can fiddle with the mechanism in the tank--the Italian equivalent of the familiar ballcock--and the running stops. But in this case the only way to stop water from pouring through the toilet, like some sort of anti-soothing water feature, was to turn it off altogether.

I assumed we'd have to call a plumber. But I'd just called our favorite idraulico, the ever-helpful Rodolfo, to discuss putting in a new second bathroom, and learned that an injured shoulder had him out of commission for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately, Danny has somehow accumulated all sorts of know-how about how to fix all kinds of things, including bathroom fixtures. All we had to do to flush the toilet, he explained, was to fill a metal mixing bowl with water in the sink and dump it into the bowl. This seemed counter-intuitive to me--we're putting more in there?--but it worked. We could get by like this for a few days until one of Rodolfo's colleagues could come and fix our gabinetto.

Now this toilet is probably half a century old, original to the building, and we've never much liked it. The inside of the bowl is shaped in such a way, with the hole way in the front,  that, to put it delicately, pretty much anything that goes in there leaves its mark. Moreover, the water pressure was weak and the pipe going out to the main is small. Compared to the Japanese Toto toilets we have in California, this one seemed unpleasantly low-appetite.

Once we started flushing by hand--that is, by pouring bowlfuls of water in ourselves--we noticed that the toilet looked vastly cleaner, just because it was finally getting a decent amount of water flow. That settled it: we didn't want the toilet fixed, we wanted a new one.

There's nothing my husband likes more than shopping for home goods of any kind, from spaghetti to major appliances. Off we went to a nearby emporium to see what was available. Danny eagerly gathered data.

Man on a mission

Surprisingly few of the toilets were compatible with our old-fashioned plumbing. It appears that when Italians redo a bathroom, they want to tear the whole thing apart and start over, with tankless toilets and high-gloss finishes.

I really get a kick out of Italian style, even if I'm not (yet?) Italian enough to embrace it.

We connected with Rodolfo's colleague, Andrea, and he sent us to a second bathroom emporium, where we found a toilet that met our requirements, including a seat with a quiet-close lid. (Once you've lived without hearing that annoying crack! every time someone uses the bathroom, it's hard to go back.) At first we were surprised by how very expensive it was. Then we realized that the salesman had included not only a toilet, but also a bidet, because here you evidently never have one without the other. We convinced him that the bidet we already have was perfectly functional and that a toilet was all we needed.

This was shortly before our trip to New York, and the salesman assured us the toilet would be delivered to Andrea and ready for installation in ten days. Perfect--we'd have it put in as soon as we got back.

You can guess where this story is headed.

Where we're still at.

It is now more than three weeks since we first ordered the toilet. After a series of prodding calls and messages, Andrea told us that the toilet had arrived, but not the seat. That was a week ago.  Today, after I sent him a slightly hysterical and probably ungrammatical message, he promised he'd be around tomorrow afternoon to put the toilet in. But it's not clear from what he wrote to me whether it will have a seat or not. At this point we don't much care.

I keep remembering what Pam told us when we first moved here: the only way to survive in Italy is to take a very Zen attitude about how long things take and the impossibility of ever finding out why what you want can't possibly happen when you want it to. Here is another aspect of Italian style that Danny and I can appreciate in the abstract but are finding exceedingly difficult to adopt ourselves.