The Mystery of the Italian Light Switch
Where Did They Put It This Time?
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 mystery
In previous blogs I tackled the mystery of the Italian washing machine, the mystery of the missing toilet seat, and most recently the mystery of the bidet.
Today the subject is the Italian light switch — that small object which, in any rational universe, would be located right inside the door of the room you are trying to illuminate. In Italy, it often is not.
Step 2: The first encounter
The first time I stepped into a bathroom in Italy and reached for the light, I patted the wall just inside the door. Nothing.
I patted higher. Nothing. I patted lower. Still nothing. I patted the other side of the doorframe. Nothing there either.
Eventually I gave up, used my phone as a flashlight, and resolved the immediate problem. Only afterward did I notice that the switch had been hiding in plain sight — on the wall outside the bathroom, about half a meter to the left of the door.
Step 3: Outside the door
This turned out not to be a one-off. It is, in fact, the standard arrangement in many homes, restaurants, hotels, and friends' apartments in Italy.
The switch for the bathroom sits outside the bathroom. You flip it before you walk in. Then you walk in, do what you came to do, walk back out, and flip it again on your way past.
It also means that anyone walking past the bathroom can flip the switch off while you are still inside — an opportunity that siblings, spouses, and mischievous nephews have been exploiting for generations.
Step 4: Inside, but on the wrong wall
The other arrangement I keep encountering is the interior switch placed on what I can only describe as the wrong wall.
You walk into a room. The door is on your right. You reach to your right for the switch. There is no switch. The switch is on the far wall, across the room, somewhere near a piece of furniture. You cross the room in the dark, find the switch by touch, turn on the light, and look back at the empty space next to the doorframe where any sensible switch would have been.
This one bewilders me more than the bathroom arrangement. At least the outside-the-bathroom switch has a story behind it. The interior switch in the wrong place just seems to have been installed by someone who wanted to keep me guessing.
Step 5: The two-switch puzzle
Then there is the matter of the dual switches.
In our bedroom there is a switch by the door and a switch by the bed. Both control the same overhead light. Flip either one and the light changes state. At first I assumed one of them was broken, since I would turn the light on at the door, walk to the bed, and discover that flipping the bedside switch turned it off again.
It took an embarrassing number of nights for me to realize that this was a feature, not a bug. The Italian word for it is deviatore, and the system is wired so that two switches control the same fixture from two locations.
I have come to appreciate this one. Turning off the bedroom light without having to get up and walk back across the room is genuinely civilized. The same arrangement shows up in hallways (one switch at each end), in stairwells (one at the top, one at the bottom), and in living rooms with more than one entrance.
This is the one switch arrangement in Italy I now wish we had in California.
Step 6: But still, why?
I have asked Italian friends and contractors about all of this, and the answers I have gotten are roughly as follows.
The bathroom-switch-outside-the-door tradition goes back to the early days of household electricity, when wiring was less reliable, switches were less waterproof, and combining electricity with a steamy bathroom was a genuine hazard. Italian electrical code — the CEI 64-8 norms that govern domestic installations — defines "zones" around water sources. The tub, the shower, the sink, the bidet all carry restrictions on what electrical fittings can be placed nearby.
Bathrooms in Italy tend to be small, and once you exclude the zones around all those fixtures there may not be much wall space left for a switch. Putting it outside the door simply solves the problem.
Modern switches with proper waterproof ratings can be installed inside, and increasingly are. But the tradition holds, and most older homes still follow it.
As for the interior switches placed on the wrong wall, my friends here have told me that this often has to do with how the wiring was originally routed. In older homes in Italy, electrical wiring runs through narrow channels carved into stone or masonry walls, and the switch ends up wherever the wiring channel could most easily be cut. Convenience to the person walking through the door was not always the deciding factor.
The dual-switch system, on the other hand, is just good design. In Italy it has been standard residential wiring for decades, while in the United States it tends to show up only in newer or more carefully designed homes.
Insights
What I have come to understand is that the placement of a light switch in Italy is rarely arbitrary, even when it looks that way to a foreigner. It usually reflects an older logic — safety regulations from a time when electricity was less forgiving, masonry walls that dictated where wires could go, or simply the way things have been done for so long that no one questions it anymore.
It is also a useful reminder that what looks inconvenient from the outside often makes perfect sense from the inside. I still grope for the switch in the wrong spot half the time. But I have stopped assuming that the way it is done in Italy is wrong.
And on the question of dual switches by the bed — Italy got that one gloriously right.
More next time.
If you enjoy this kind of look at Italian life, you may enjoy my book — which finds the same magic in Rome and beyond, through the people who live there and the ones who lived there long ago.
She Seduced Me: A Love Affair with Rome — a book of Italian life, culture, and history, told through my own experience of the city, interviews with Romans and street performers, and the stories of figures like Caravaggio and the senators of ancient Rome.
"Brings the city lying behind the tourist façade to life." — LibraryThing review
Comments