PART II: Italian Attempts At Globalization: Pooping Alongside the Rest of Us

Since the widespread use of mass production techniques made Anglo-Western goods of all shapes and sizes easy to find and economical to buy, the xenophobic Italian powers-that-be have exerted a concerted effort to keep these products out of the hands of their people. But as the 1989 downfall of Soviet-brand communism has illustrated, cultural imperialism is as inevitable as the ebb and flow of one's bowels after a particularly piccanté chimichanga.

McDonalds, Walt Disney and Starbucks can be fought but can never be defeated. So despite endless efforts by Italy's most pinko-minded Bolshevikartists to keep the products of American capitalism out, even by the early decades of the 1900s a Mafia-run black market had been established in Italy to profit from the contraband that embodied Anglo-Western culture.

And with all the modern marvels that were suddenly available to the wide-eyed Italians, no item was as frequently requested and more laboriously sought after than the American toilet.

A staple of pooping facilities in the US since the turn of the century, the toilet didn't take long to travel overseas -- although at first it was only available to those with money, political swagger, or very large and perky breasts. As a human exemplar of these three traits, Benito Mussolini (millionaire, Fascist leader, C-cup wearer) had not one but sixty-eight toilets in his palatial Roman villa, La Casa Del Pupu.

FIG 3: Safety first! If you see someone on the train with books, bottles or other large objects, remind them not to shit them into the toilet. (In Italian: Per favore, non defecare quello oggetto sul bagno!)

Of course, in keeping with party politics, Mussolini had to exercise fascist practices by impounding black market toilets as they entered the country. At one point, Mussolini was said to have had more dogs trained to sniff out porcelain than to flush out refugees! However, the leader's hypocrisy eventually became his downfall. As the Allied Forces landed in Sicily in 1943, Mussolini's palace (comprised mostly of bathrooms) was ransacked and his fetish for comfortably-seated defecation was exposed to the still-squatting public.

After the discovery, nothing short mandatory colostomy-bags for all Italian residents could have kept the people from demanding American toilets at affordable prices.

It's interesting to note that despite having used the devices now for nearly 60 years, Italians still have not perfected the use of sit-down-style toilets. This ignorance of proper pooping protocol becomes immediately evident to travelers as they enter any Italian bathroom and find the ubiquitous emergency alarm cord located on the wall directly behind the bowl (after a record-high 17 deaths-by-flushing in 1965, the Italians unanimously passed legislation in favor of obligatory installation of the safety device in all public WCs).

Furthermore, improper usage of toilets is not limited only to those that stand still -- even toilets found in the Italian mass transit system have had their share of accidents. For example, consider train travel: bathroom management crews aboard cushy Eurostar trains have found it necessary to warn users against eating books, bottles and cans before boarding, as defecating then flushing such bulky items onto the tracks might cause derailing (see Fig. 3).

The reader may remember the infamous crash of Intercity 5114, in which a first-class seat-holder foolishly excreted Giovanni Boccaccio's 1,000-page novel, The Decameron -- sending the train reeling into the Ligurian Sea and killing everyone aboard.

Also noticeable in the train's WC cabin is a roll of Western-style toilet paper, an indulgence only for those who wish to shell out the extra Lira (soon Euros) necessary to travel with Eurostar. One of Italy's most significant shortages is lumber, so most other train companies on the peninsula still offer the traditional and more affordable alternative to paper-based toilet tissue: moistened slabs of unbaked terracotta, still based on the original formula of the Della Robbia family!

(Did you read Part I? If so, check out Part III.)