La Biancheria

The Laundry

There may be a few things I will miss when I leave this beautiful country of Italy but I must say with the utmost certainty that I will NEVER miss doing my laundry here.

I am actually lucky when it comes to Laundry, Maurizio and I found an apartment, which does have a laundry machine. Well, this said machine we have had to pay over 200 Euros for various repairs but still, we have one. There are many rental apartments that don’t have one at all. And even luckier, we actually have a small space to keep our machine, a sort of laundry room. A lot of apartments just stick their machine anywhere they can and more often than not it is located somewhere in the kitchen in plain sight. Makes sense, cook some dinner, and finish some laundry. I guess it works! For me, I much prefer these types of appliances to be hidden out of site.



So that being said, I am still a girl from the USA. I am a girl who has been spoiled by all of our modern day conveniences and large over the top appliances. I am the typical American girl who thinks bigger is better. Okay okay, maybe it’s not best for the environment but I prefer a MACHINE, not a trinket, which can handle at least 6 towels at one time. I mean c’mon, is that really asking for so much???

Well, over the past week and a half I have allowed our laundry to pile up and since today is my “rest” day before the half marathon this weekend I have chosen this to actually be my Laundry Day. I started this process 1 hour and a half ago and I probably wont be finished for another 4 hours. My little trinket of a machine only holds about 3 full size towels and a few kitchen towels at a time. This means my laundry takes double the time. We, like most people, change our towels often so it’s going to take me at least 2 loads to finish washing the towels. Then I have to move on to the whites and darks. Total, this should equal up to 5 loads. Each load on “economia breve” which means the economy brief cycle still takes at least 1 hour just to WASH the clothes.


Washing the clothes is the easy part, just throw them in and sit back and wait. The fun part comes next when you have to sort the clothes and put them up on the line, or as we do, the collapsible drying rack. If we dried our clothes outside it would definitely take a lot less time because, if sunny, they would obviously dry much quicker. However, if you dry your clothes outside on my little enclosed patio space you are taking great risks.

We live on the 1st floor (in Italy), which is actually the 2nd floor (in the USA) and with this apartment comes a small little patio, sort of like a courtyard. It’s surrounded by 4 walls of the other apartment buildings and barely gets much sunlight because the walls are high. There are 3 other apartments, each on its own floor, in our building.
At the highest point on one of the sides some pigeons have made a nest and we will regularly see massive amounts of bird crap and feathers in our patio space. Before I have had the clothes outside, whites of course, and have come home to find diarrhea explosions all over Maurizio white work shirts. AWESOME!!! Of course I had to spend another hour re-washing those and some I have had to throw away because it wouldn’t come out.


Directly above us lives a family from, we don’t know where??? They definitely aren’t Italian! We can’t make out what language they are speaking. We have had a lot of difficulty with this particular family and I am almost 100% positive that they hide illegal people in their apartment because every week it seems there is someone new living in there. Anyhow, it must be part of their culture that they think its perfectly okay to empty their garbage, hair from their hairbrushes, and various other disgusting things into our patio. Seeing our clothes hanging on the line doesn’t stop them I actually think it encourages them to dump more of their waist into our space.

Another factor of hanging your laundry outside is obviously the weather. The weather here in Florence can sometimes be like that in Florida where a quick rainstorm can begin, as quickly as it disappears and with me, it never fails as soon as I leave the apartment it would rain!!! I would find myself racing home to bring everything inside before it got soaked and therefore would need to be rewashed.

So, these are the reasons I have opted to doing smaller loads of laundry regularly throughout the week. You would never be able to enter my apartment without finding our drying rack in tact full of clothes. Now, because it takes so long to dry the clothes and I can only fit so many on the rack I basically have to do laundry every other day. The day in between is a day of waiting for the others to dry.


Today, because I have waited so long to keep up with my laundry I will most definitely have to haul my clothes down to the self-service laundry facilities and dry my clothes. On occasion I will do this but it costs 3 Euros for 30 minutes, which adds up overtime. I have to load up my roller carrier; the one I use for groceries, and drag everything only about 3 blocks away and wait for the 30 minutes. I guess it beats having all this laundry located all over my house. This is sometimes a sort of treat for me because if I dry my towels they become soft and unlike every other day when they act as an exfoliate. You must remember that line drying causes stiffness or crunchiness.

Anyhow, the next time you are having your own “Laundry Day” you can think about me here in Italy and remember things could be a hell of a lot worse!!