Simplifying Laundry in Italy
How We Finally Stopped Letting It Take Over Our Days
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 now our life!
We live in Tuscany in the fall, return again in the spring, and spend the rest of the time in California.
Step 1: Today's topic
In previous blogs I wrote about the mystery of the Italian washing machine, revisited that mystery once we understood the Eco cycle, and walked through our decision to finally buy a dryer.
This post picks up where those left off. Today I want to share three things we have learned since: what happened the week we used an all-in-one washer-dryer combo, how Italian dryers actually work technically, and the daily routine we have settled into now that laundry has stopped taking over our days.
Step 2: The journey so far
To recap briefly — and the previous post on getting a dryer covers the details — we tried just about everything before landing on a system that worked:
Hanging laundry on lines on the terrace in Puglia, until smoke from burning fields kept ruining it
Draping wet clothes over radiators in winter, which filled the house with damp shirts
Buying an electric heating clothesline in Tuscany, which needed clothes laid in a single layer across the top — about two t-shirts' worth, leaving the rest of the wet laundry to deal with separately
Driving to the laundromat in a nearby town once a week, which cost us entire afternoons
Eventually we bought a stackable washer and dryer. What follows is what happened next.
Step 3: A week with a combo machine
Before we bought our own appliances, we spent a week in an Airbnb that had a single all-in-one combo machine — washer and dryer in the same drum. We had been seriously considering one for our house, and the timing felt fortunate. A week of hands-on use would tell us more than any sales pitch.
The idea is appealing. One machine. One drum. Load the clothes, walk away, come back to dry laundry. No transferring, no folding wet clothes between cycles, no second appliance to find space for.
What we discovered was that the reality was different from the promise. Because the machine has to fit both washing and drying components into a single unit, the actual drum was small — much smaller than a standard washer. We could only do tiny loads, and a single load took five hours or more from start to finish. And even those small loads often came out damp at the end — the drying side of a combo machine simply cannot handle the same volume of wet laundry that the washer can.
Later, I read that Consumer Reports tests had reached the same conclusion: every combo machine they tested had what they called less than satisfactory dryer performance, with twelve-pound loads taking over three hours just to dry. The issue is structural. A combo machine has to do both jobs in the same drum, and the drying side simply cannot be as powerful as a dedicated dryer.
We were grateful for that week. It saved us from buying the wrong thing for our home.
Step 4: The stackable solution
When we returned to Italy, we ordered a stackable washer and dryer — two separate machines, with the dryer mounted on top of the washer. The details of finding one that fit our nonstandard space are in the previous post.
What I want to add here is the simple result. Two separate machines, each doing one job well, took up almost no more floor space than a single combo machine would have. And they cut our total laundry time roughly in half.
Step 5: How Italian dryers actually work
This is worth knowing before you buy one in Italy, because the technology is not what most Americans are used to.
Almost all dryers sold in Italy are condenser dryers, also called ventless dryers. They do not vent hot, damp air outside through a wall hose the way American dryers typically do. Instead, the dryer pulls moisture out of the clothes by passing hot air through them, then runs that humid air through a condenser inside the machine. The condenser cools the air, the moisture condenses into liquid water, and that water is pumped into a small removable tank in the upper part of the machine.
After each load, you slide the tank out, empty it into the sink, and slide it back. Some models can be plumbed directly into a drain, eliminating the emptying step.
The reason for this design is straightforward. Most older homes in Italy — built in stone, masonry, or historic-center configurations — do not have an external vent and cannot easily accommodate one. Cutting a hose-sized hole through a thick stone wall is not a small undertaking. The condenser dryer skips the problem entirely. You plug it in, you empty the tank, and that is it.
The trade-offs are that condenser dryers run cooler and longer than vented dryers, and they have smaller drying capacity. Once you know that going in, the planning becomes easier.
Step 6: Our daily routine
This is the part I almost did not include — it sounded too ordinary to bother with — but it may be the most useful part of the post for anyone trying to figure out the rhythm.
We almost always run both machines on Eco mode. On Eco, the wash cycle takes about two and a half hours, and the dryer takes another two to three hours. There is a rapid wash cycle that finishes in thirty minutes, and a rapid dry cycle of about an hour and fifteen minutes, but those use considerably more electricity. Given Italian electricity prices, Eco is almost always the right choice.
The trick is timing. We start the washer before we leave the house for coffee or the gym. By the time we are back, the wash is done and ready to transfer. The dryer then runs in the afternoon while we are doing other things. The cycles are long, but if you stagger them around your day, you barely notice them.
One more thing worth knowing: Italian dryer capacity is smaller than what most Americans are used to. Packing a dryer full of wet clothes results in very long drying times. We learned to do smaller, more frequent loads — a couple a week each, instead of two giant Sunday loads. Counterintuitively, smaller loads done more often save time overall, because each load actually dries.
Step 7: Laundry is hardly on our radar anymore
That, in the end, was the goal.
We did not move to Italy to spend our days managing laundry. We moved here for the slower pace, the long lunches, the conversations with neighbors in the piazza, the time to write. The right system meant the laundry could get done in the background while we got on with life.
It took some trial and error to get there. But once we landed on the combination of a proper stackable, the Eco cycle, and small frequent loads, laundry stopped being a problem to solve. Now it is just something that happens.
Insights
What I have come to understand is that there is no single right answer to laundry in Italy — only the answer that fits your life. The combo machine sounded ideal but did not work for us. The stackable washer and dryer, run on the Eco cycle in small frequent loads, did. None of this was the answer we would have picked at the start. But once we found the combination, laundry stopped taking up real estate in our days. If you are working out your own, the only test that matters is whether it lets the laundry get out of your way.
More next time.
If you enjoy reading about Italian life, you may enjoy my book on southern Italy — where two Californians meet a region shaped as much by its history as by the people living in it now.
Stories from Puglia: Two Californians in Southern Italy — a book of southern Italian life, culture, and history, told through my own experience of the region and the stories behind its towns, its people, and its past.
"This book elevated my trip. Well written and fun." — Amazon reviewer
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