The Mystery of the Italian Washing Machine
Updated: Aug 11
Why is the washing machine still going?
It might be interesting to share how we pulled off living in Italy for part of the year. I will post some steps and what we are learning along the way. We love every minute of it, and what was once a dream is our life!
We live in Tuscany in the Fall, then back again in the Spring, and in California for the rest of the time (in a previous blog, I explained why we live in Italy only part of the year).
As we explore areas in Italy, we discover some gems worth sharing. Some are well-known tourist magnets, and others are lesser-known but always amazing.
This week, we finally get to the bottom of the Italian washing machine mystery. But first, a tour of everywhere else we have had to improvise: hotel sinks, laundromats we could not use, and one particularly resourceful bidet.
Step 1: Planning ahead
When traveling or living in Italy, I always try to stay in an Airbnb with a washing machine, so I do not have to worry about running out of clothes. But sometimes I have stayed in a hotel while traveling around the country and sought other laundry solutions. I will share some of my experiences.
Step 2: The full-service laundromat conundrum
Our trip to the Italian Dolomites a few years ago was incredible. We stayed in a beautiful hotel in a stunning area for a week. We hiked, picnicked, hiked again, took the gondola up the mountain, then hiked some more. With all that hiking, we got sweaty and ended up showering a few times a day, and quickly ran out of clean clothes.
Our sinks could not keep up, so we bagged the whole pile and went looking for a laundromat in town.
We found one, eventually. "You can't do it yourselves," the woman behind the counter told us, "but we can wash it for you." Fair enough, we thought, until she came back with a price. It turned out the cost depended on the weight of the pile, and ours weighed enough to run us over $60. We picked out what we could still manage in the sinks, left the rest with her, and paid $40 for what remained.
That was years ago, so I have no idea what it would cost today. But we learned our lesson: pack for the hiking, not just the trip.
Step 3: The self-service laundromat
When I go to Rome and stay in my favorite neighborhood, Campo dei Fiori, I know exactly where the self-service laundromat is. If I am staying somewhere without a washing machine, which is rare, I just wash my clothes there. Simple.
Other European cities are not always so obliging.
A few years ago in Vienna, we had too many clothes to wash in the sink. I found a self-service laundromat online: a thirty-minute bus ride away, down streets neither of us knew, for an activity that could eat half a day we could have spent seeing Vienna. My partner looked at the map, then at me. "I don't want to waste our precious time here doing that," he said.
He had a point, especially since there was an H&M two blocks from our lodging. We walked over, bought a few cheap new pieces, and were back out exploring within the hour. Lesson learned: when there is a fast-fashion store closer than the laundromat, do not fight it.
Step 4: Washing in my room
I have to confess that I have never used a bidet for its designed purpose, but I have found that it is the perfect shape and size for soaking and washing socks and underwear, after sanitizing it, of course. The plus is hassle-free washing using minimal time. The minus is that the clothes are refreshed but not truly cleaned, and finding a place to dry them can be a hassle. Enough said about that.
Step 5: The Italian washing machine mystery
My first experience of the mystery of the Italian washing machine was while staying with a friend in Rome. After a few days I needed to do laundry, so I threw some clothes in, poured in some detergent, and set it to the "cotton" cycle. When I left the apartment and returned about four hours later, the wash cycle was still churning.
There were three of us in the apartment, and at this rate we could only do two small laundry loads a day. We all studied the illustrated dial on the washing machine, which looked like something off the Voyager spacecraft, the kind of symbol some other civilization was supposed to be able to decipher.
Even my friend, who owned the apartment and had lived there for years, stared at it as baffled as we were. He had never really thought about it, he admitted; living there alone, he just threw a load in before leaving for work and dealt with it whenever he got home. We could not figure it out, so we started doing laundry before bed, another load when one of us first got up, and another during the day.
So there we have it: the mystery of the Italian washing machine.
Why such long cycles in the first place? A local friend told us it comes down to water and energy conservation.
She also explained the real mechanical difference: a typical American washing machine hooks up to both the hot and cold lines and simply draws pre-heated water from the house's own water heater. An Italian washing machine, by contrast, usually connects to cold water only. Whatever heat the wash needs, the machine has to generate itself, one degree at a time, which is a big part of why the cycle stretches out so long.
Now that we live in Puglia, we have not so much cracked this mystery as learned to work around it. We found a fifteen-minute cycle on the dial, and we run it twice, at 30 degrees Celsius, which is about room temperature. Our local friends protested, telling us our clothes would never get clean on such a short cycle. Well, they seem clean to us.
Step 6: Dryer luxuries
We went to Naples with local friends last year and wandered through the incredible streets, taking in the history, the architecture, and the laundry. When we happened upon someone's clothes drying rack on the street, chained to a pole, I remarked, "But don't they have dryers here?"
Our Italian friends stopped in the street, looked at each other, and burst out laughing. They still tell this story to their friends; one of them said it reminds them of the line attributed to Marie Antoinette: "Let them eat cake."
Since Italy has to import all of its gas and most of its energy, having a dryer is something of a luxury, since dryers take a lot of energy to run. So the American assumption that an Italian home or family has a dryer makes our Italian friends laugh. And rightly so.
Step 7: The washer-dryer combination
"Wow, this is so cool! We have a washer that also dries our clothes!" I said to my partner the moment we checked into our Airbnb in Seville, Spain. Combined washer-dryers are common enough in Europe, though almost unheard of in the US, and we were thrilled with the new convenience.
The excitement lasted until my partner came down with the flu on that same trip, feverish and sweating through his clothes, and we actually needed to use it. "Good thing we have this washer-dryer combo," I said, cheerfully opening the door to load it up.
The clothes would not go in. I tried stuffing them in as one bundle, gave up, and knelt down to get a proper look inside. That is when I saw the problem: the machinery packed into that thing left almost no room for an actual wash basin. We could fit in a handful of items at a time, and what took one load in California took three loads here.
Each of those loads took five hours or more, wash and dry combined. Three loads meant the better part of a day standing guard over a machine the size of a nightstand, and by the end of it, my partner's clothes were still damp.
We have not used a washer-dryer combo since.
Step 8: Drying clothes
Without a dryer, clothes need to be hung out to dry. When we are here in Puglia in the summer, it is a simple task to carry the clothes to our terrace, hang them on the clothesline, and bring them down a few hours later.
In the winter, the challenge is finding a spot where clothes will dry as quickly as possible. Like most Italian households, we have an indoor folding clothesline, which we set up in front of our radiator. When we run out of space, we lay socks or other small items directly on the radiator itself, only when we are in the house, but please do not tell anyone about that.
Insights
I have not read a scientific study on the topic, but our local friends claim that their system of washing, front-loading machines and longer cycles, gets clothes cleaner and is more water- and energy-efficient. They also say front-loading machines are easier on your clothes. The cleaner-clothes part makes sense to me: a longer cycle means washing more of the dirt out. I was less sure at the time how running a machine for hours could use less energy than the short cycles we were used to in California, but this was the mystery that later sent me looking for a proper answer — one I found in a follow-up post.
Here in Puglia, our clothes smell and look clean. We use the quick wash cycle and have figured out how to dry our clothes in both summer and winter. If any of that changes, I will need to write another blog.
More next time.
If unraveling one small mystery of Italian daily life made you smile, there is a whole book of them.
She Seduced Me: A Love Affair with Rome takes you through Roman life, culture, and history — the people, the streets, the history hiding behind the everyday.
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