The Mystery of the Tiny Italian Shower

Confessions of a Big Guy in a Small Box

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. In a previous blog, I explained why we live in Italy only part of the year.

Step 1: Today's mystery

Our Mystery series collects things I encounter in our life in Italy that puzzle me at first — until I learn what is really going on. This week, we step into another modest but mighty puzzle — the shower. Specifically, the tiny one. The very, very tiny one.

Step 2: The first encounter

When I first moved to Italy, it was my pre-gym era. I was a skinny young guy with a light suitcase. I lived in a seminary in Rome, and somehow I never really noticed the size of the showers there. They fit me, more or less, and I gave them no further thought.

Fast forward several decades.

These days, strangers ask me all the time if I played football. Perhaps it is because, after years of workouts, I have more of a football player's build than the skinny guy who moved to Rome in the 80s. When I returned to Italy and stepped into one of those same showers, that was when the mystery began.

Step 3: The art of not turning around

The first lesson came quickly: in many showers here, I do not turn around. A smaller person can. I cannot.

I learned to step in, position myself, and accomplish everything from that one spot. Need to rinse the other side? I don't rotate — I shuffle, sideways, like a crab planning his next move. I have knocked shampoo bottles off shelves with my elbow more times than I can count.

Even worse is the shower with no shelf at all. You set the shampoo on the floor at your feet, and when you need it again, you discover that retrieving a bottle from the floor requires shutting off the water, opening the door, leaning out, and bending down — because there is nowhere inside the shower to bend.

My one real workaround is the hand-held washing wand. When the shower has one, I can spray any part of myself without needing to turn around. When it doesn't, I am back to the crab shuffle.

A friend here, when I confessed all this, looked at me with the patient kindness one reserves for slightly slow children. "Mark," he said, "you don't turn. You arrive already facing the right way."

Step 4: Washing my feet, an unsolved problem

Then there is the matter of the feet.

In a shower the size I'm used to, you reach down with a washcloth and you wash your feet. Simple. In a shower the size of a phone booth, the problem starts the moment I try to lift a foot — because raising it means bending my knee, and bending my knee means my knee meets the door or the wall when my foot has barely left the floor.

So I tried the other direction: bend down and reach the feet with the washcloth from above. That did not work either. There is no room to bend down. My head hits the opposite wall before I have made it halfway.

After several embarrassing close calls, I made peace with a quiet truth: my feet would have to settle for whatever soapy water happened to flow down to them.

Step 5: But still — why?

For a long time, I assumed the tiny shower was an architectural oversight — that someone, somewhere, had simply forgotten about people of various sizes.

But the more places I stayed in across Italy, the more I realized that small showers are common here. Not every shower is tiny — but enough of them are that it cannot be an accident. So I asked some local friends.

Step 6: The reasons behind it

It turns out, from what my friends here told me, that the tiny shower is not a design flaw at all. It is a thoughtful response to several practical realities.

The first is the bathroom itself. A 1975 hygiene law in Italy requires every bathroom to have four fixtures: a toilet, a bidet, a sink, and a shower or tub. In older homes here, bathrooms were often small to begin with — and fitting all four fixtures into them while complying with the code means each fixture must accept its share of the squeeze. The shower, being the most flexible in size, gives up the most ground.

The second is energy. Electricity and gas here are among the most expensive in Europe, and heating water is one of the larger draws on either. Most homes use tank water heaters — the scaldabagno — that hold a finite supply of hot water and require energy to keep it hot. A smaller shower means a shorter shower, which means less hot water used and less energy spent heating it. Generations of households here have built a quiet efficiency around this, and it shows up in the dimensions of the shower itself.

For many of us Americans, a shower is often part bath, part therapy session — a place to stand under hot water and let our worries swirl down the drain. Here, the shower has a simpler job: get clean, then get out.

The third is the building stock. Many homes here sit in historical centers where walls cannot be moved, ceilings cannot be raised, and footprints cannot be expanded. You work with what you have, and what you have is usually charming, old, and not particularly generous with square meters.

Seen this way, the tiny shower is not a problem to solve. It is a sensible answer to a real set of constraints — and a quietly elegant one, even if my elbows disagree.

Insights

I have come to respect the tiny shower in Italy, even on the days when it does not respect me back. It uses less water, fits beautifully into spaces a larger shower could not, and asks something of the bather that the oversized American shower never does: a little efficiency, a little grace, a little willingness to fit yourself to your surroundings instead of expecting them to accommodate you.

More broadly, living in another country has taught me to be slow to complain and quick to embrace. When something works differently than what I am used to, the temptation is to declare it wrong. But that habit turns the foreigner into a cultural judge — and judges, by definition, are no longer learning. An open mind is the price of admission to a new place, and the reward is the chance to see the wisdom in ways of doing things that are not your own.

Even, occasionally, the wisdom of a shower whose size reminds me that it is not a place to meditate, but a place to get clean and get out.

More next time.

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