Italy has a long and interesting history. Thousands of years before uniting as a country, the boot-shaped peninsula was home to many disparate nation-states. Rome, Naples, Milan, Venice -- they all waged war to vie for power and each was able to maintain its own specific government, culture, even language!

But times change. As efforts for Italian unification grew stronger, so did the ties that bind. As such, all Italians -- despite their city of origin -- were able to put aside their differences and embrace their similarities.

And on no subject did the people of Italy find more to agree upon than their philosophy on poop.

PART I: The World's First Toilet (And Quite Often, Italy's Current Toilet)

It's a commonly known fact that the Italian language as we know it today traces its roots to the words of the great poets of Tuscany, most notably Dante Alighieri -- an honor for which most residents of the region continue to maintain pride.

But as much credit as is given to Dante for shaping their mother tongue, few Italians are aware of another great gift he bestowed, not only upon their peninsula, but on the entire world: the first toilet.

Prima donnas of their time, the great poets of Italy claimed their artistry would suffer if they were not kept in a state of perfect comfort. Such whining allotted them a variety of luxuries -- from fine foods and delicious, old wine to fine women and delicious, young stableboys. But it was in their request for a more agreeable manner in which to relieve their bowels that the opulent lifestyles of these men actually came to the aid of mankind.

FIG 1: A distressed Dante ashamedly hides his poop-covered sleeve from the object of his affections, Beatrice (represented here as the Great Condor of Hygiene).

Since the 9th century BC -- the date attributed to the roots of the peninsula's first major civilization, the Etruscans -- all indoor bowel movements in Italy had traditionally been made in a wooden bucket. The container was held with one hand while squatting, after which its contents would be jettisoned through the nearest window. But as society evolved and beliefs on personal cleanliness came to the forefront, the great minds of the pre-Renaissance began to find fault in the old ways.

Clothed in the flowing robes common to the privileged class, writers like Dante and Petrarch had frequent trouble holding a bucket beneath their finery without soiling their lacy sleeves. In fact, this problem tortured Dante to such extent that he once considered annexing an additional canto to the Inferno chapter of his Divine Comedy, in which Virgil would reveal a stage of hell where hypocrites and pedophiles are forced to wear feces-covered robes to fancy dinner parties. He later decided against publishing this description after realizing it was a clear conflict of interests.

Dante's shit-on-the-sleeve phenomenon had the effect of a double-edged sword on the poet's life. At times it was the bane of his existence, as the road-apple of Dante's eye (a fetching young wench by the name of Beatrice) outrightly refused to be courted by any man with feces-stained vestments (see Fig. 1). However, Dante's pooping problems became a boon to the entire world, as the poet turned the pain of his love's rejections into one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind.

Though not known for his innovations, Dante set about to search for a new way of pooping. What if it wasn't necessary to hold an arm beneath the robe while defecating? What if the bowel relief process could be executed without the use of ones' hands whatsoever?

After asking himself these seemingly silly rhetorical questions, and having worked through the expense and embarrassment of a series of marked failures (surviving documents from Dante's tailor show that during his experiments the poet purchased at least three new robes to replace those he had soiled beyond recognition), he found the answer: The Squatter.

The Squatter (see Fig. 2) is the penultimate example of the old maxim: Need is the Mother of Invention. In this case, what Dante needed was to poop without getting feces all over his clothing. The resulting invention was a hole in the ground over which the poet, or anyone else for that matter, could squat (hence the name) and poop without the use of his hands.

FIG 2: Dante's original Squatter remains in pristine condition in Florence, while the poet's actual protopoops have been relocated to London, where the National Gallery's hi-tech security system can ensure their safety from turd burglars.

The rationale behind Dante's Squatter was quite simple. Without having to hold a bucket beneath one's gowns, one could avoid the accidental wiping of one's ass with one's own sleeves.

Of course, this new device would involve quite a bit more overhead than the traditional method. While building a wooden bucket took no more than two hours for most skilled carpenters, and could be paid for with a jug of wine and half a roasted capon, installing a squatter into a home required days of arduous labor and could rack up expenses in excess of three Florins!

But true to the laws of economics, as production methods progressed and demand increased, prices quickly declined. And true to the laziness of the Italian people, few improvements were ever made to the ancient device. Even today, when the rest of the Western world is seated comfortably on modern toilet seats, some Italians still fight gravity and the lactic-acid building in their thighs to cop a squat over the medieval feces-removal system that Dante Alighieri made a reality.

As for Dante himself, having invented The Squatter, the poet reapproached the lovely Beatrice with completely poop-free garments -- at which point he learned of his love's lesbianism, overdosed on a self-applied hemlock enema, and died.

On to Part II [1]...