Where to go to the bathroom in art cities? Answers to the most frequently asked questions of tourists

Out-of-town trip to an art city? If we took a survey of tour guides, perhaps the question they hear most frequently is “where is the bathroom?” Which also often coincides with the first one they receive from tourists. Indeed, many tourists do not feel like looking for a café under the guise of coffee (at least one consumption we have to make, otherwise the shopkeeper may refuse to let you use the toilets) in order to then use the bathroom. Where then should tourists who need a restroom head to? Let us see ùwhat the situation is in 5 Italian cities for the tourist who would like to go to the bathroom for free or at most spend 1 euro in Venice, Florence, Rome, Bologna and Milan.

Consider that in London there are 2,600 public toilets and in Paris 435 and that the same history of public toilets in the twentieth century saw the development in some major Italian cities of the famous Alberghi Diurni that in the 1920s in splendid Art Nouveau style landed in Italy modeled on what existed next to the London Underground stop at Victoria Station. Like those under Piazza Oberdan in Milan, opened in 1925 by entrepreneur Cleopatro Cobianchi, who in 1911 opened the first such establishment in Bologna. They were beautiful and well-kept places, aspa ante litteram if you will, equipped not only with toilets but also a barber shop, shower and other attached services used by travelers but not only.

So let’s start with Venice, which is getting ready to charge tourists an entrance fee to the lagoon, to see how it welcomes them from this point of view: Venice actually beats all, because in addition to the ’card’ that can be purchased at a flat rate with a certain number of museum admissions inside (which in Venice is called the “Unica card”), as in all the trivial other cities, here we outdo ourselves with the WC card: the card with a subscription to public toilets! They even created their own institutional site (by the municipality together with the managing company) that collects information about the toilets, complete with a geo-referenced search engine with the inconfodible domain name: wctoilettevenezia.com. It’s all very clear, explained in the website of the municipality of Venice: “In order to facilitate the visitors who frequent the city of Venice, in order to indicate the public toilets managed by VERITAS s.p.a., a special map has been prepared that allows to reach the toilets more easily, including QR code for Android and Ios. The back of the map shows, in five languages, some Public Hygiene Rules and, on the subject of waste, also the vademecum for tourists temporarily residing for rent in Venice. The map can be downloaded in PDF format. For more information and rates you can consult the Veritas toilets page or the site dedicated to the historic center of Venice where you can search for the nearest Veritas public toilet and download the dedicated APP. There are also pictures and information about the services offered (e.g., nursery and changing tables), costs and opening hours.”

A total of 374 public toilets are available in the City of Venice, from different operators “and for each grouping there is always at least one service for the disabled and in some cases nurseries. Some services are free, others are charged (for toilets operated by Veritas see attached rates)” depending on age, if you are disabled and if you have a WC Card the cost ranges from zero to 1.5 euros. There are 191 Veritas toilets facilities (Tronchetto, Piazzale Roma, San Leonardo, Rialto Novo, San Bartolomeo, San Marco, Accademia, Bragora, Giardini Napoleonici, Murano, Burano, Torcello, Sant’Elena, Lido Quattro Fontane, Punta Fusina, Mercato Marghera, Giardini Reali in San Marco and in SS Filippo and Giacomo) and at this link addresses, schedules and features.

The local transportation company Avm provides 27 toilets (garages at Piazzale Roma, Piazzale Cialdini in Mestre, Santa Maria Elisabetta at Lido, ZTL bus - via dei Petroli in Marghera), the Railways 15 toilets at Santa Lucia Station, at Tronchetto Parking: 24 toilets; Fontego dei Tedeschi: 23 toilets. In addition, of course, to the services inside the museums (59 toilets) for visitors.

Let’s look at Rome instead. To do a lot of ’plin plin’ in Rome one has to consult the website of the urban hygiene company Ama, which operates 52 public toilets in all districts. The site reads, “The complete list of free masonry public toilets and automated mobile toilets, for a fee (€ 1), is online. To view the nearest toilets simply go to the ’Services in your neighborhood’ section and type the name of a street in the ’Search’ box, or you can view the list in a pdf version. The system allows users to locate the 52 public toilets in the municipality and learn their times and addresses. The free masonry toilets are equipped with childcare points, tactile paths for the visually impaired, alarm and assistance services.” Logically, every train station (Termini, Tiburtina, Ostiense) and subway station is equipped with bathrooms, all of which charge one euro. In addition, the City of Rome in eight Tourist Information Points has attached wheelchair-accessible toil ets plus three other places of only toilets without information service (in Piazza di Spagna, near the Vatican and in Trastevere). The service costs 1 euro and is free for “Roma Pass” holders. On the City’s website, however, we could not find a map or a list of them with this information, only the page where the official in charge of the service with his internal phone number is indicated.

Continued cleaning and upgrading will certainly be important in view of the Jubilee 2025; the current number is small compared to the amount of tourists in the city year-round. A complete map of all toilets cannot be found on the City’s institutional website, but with a quick Google search, addresses and schedules can be found on various information sites. Once found, however, the situation is not guaranteed (as with all cities for that matter). In April 2023, Roma Capitale’s Agency for the Control and Quality of Local Public Services, Acos, did a survey with 140 field inspections (in 70 community restrooms in the areas with the most tourism) and the result was not good: they are old, without timely maintenance, dirty, 65 percent of those inspected are described as “not decent,” 8 percent fairly decent and 27 percent very decent, toilets were found open in 61 percent of the inspections, 24 percent of the times they seemed “abandoned,” in 14 percent of the surveys they were closed, and in 2 cases opening hours were not respected.

“Each toilet,” they explain, “was visited twice, for a total of 140 inspections. Twenty-five toilets reportable to the Environmental Protection Department (conducted in economy or granted by tender) were monitored: 10 ’ex AMA’ (i.e. managed until 2016 by AMA SpA and no longer entrusted to others), 8 in masonry, 7 in public parks. The inspections also involved 12 ’tourist’ toilets: in particular of these facilities, 11 P.STOP and the toilet inside the Tourist Infopoint (PIT) in Fori Imperiali were checked. Checks were also carried out on 20 toilets in local public transport stations: 18 in the metro and 2 in stations of the Rome-Civita Castellana-Viterbo Railway. Thirteen toilets in as many indoor district markets completed the sample.” Full report here.

Let’s turn to Milan to see what efficiency and effectiveness solutions they have come up with for tourists in Milan. In March 2023, a tender was launched to rearrange the city’s 49 public toilets (a bit few) and the creation of 21 more (including their management): the service will be free because as a quid pro quo the winner will be able to install 71 new large advertising panels already present in the city today, transforming them from analog to digital. In the meantime, the city administration’s website offers a geo-referenced map (a somewhat difficult portal to govern) showing the various accessible toilets distinguished by color between fixed, fixed masonry and mobile or temporary (with different colors). The price is not indicated but 20 cents (good price for the fixed self-cleaning masonry ones) is enough in many of them and one euro in some such as at the station at platform 21. Only coins are accepted. The complete list of all toilets including those run by other parties (Metro, Urban Sanitation Company....) can be found on the page of one of the radio cab cooperatives on this page where address and details are given in 4 pdf sheets. A look at the map shows that they are designed for the general citizenry being many in green areas, rather than for tourists. If you are in Piazza Duomo there are toilets at the side of the Cathedral but if you want a better and free service you can go to Palazzo Reale (on the right looking at the Duomo) where the ground floor offers a large toilet with also changing area. There are also on the second floor. Also in the area but going left looking at the Duomo is the famous Rinascente. Here you only need to go up to the seventh floor to use them. If you don’t feel like pretending to look through the clothes and take the inside tour there is also a passage that from the seventh floor reaches directly to the street: in fact, in Via Santa Radegonda there is a small door with an elevator that leads only to the seventh floor. And that’s it.

In Bologna on the Municipality’s website there is a page with the list of toilets and also of the vespasians (yes, evidently they are still there) for a total of 15 toilets between self-cleaning stalls and toilets inside public buildings whose maximum admission price is 50 cents, some are free. There are six urinals, and there are also plans to put in more, as the councillor for public works told the Resto del Carlino in April last year: “there are plans to install seven new generation urinals” in parks, gardens and green areas. “But in the coming years, it is the precise will of the city administration to allocate additional funding to increase the city’s public restroom supply.”

It is worth noting that in May 2023 the Bologna City Council approved an agenda that calls for the elimination of gendered signs on public restrooms and voting booths. At the Bologna central train station, bathrooms cost 1 euro.

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Let’s go downhill again and move on to Florence, where there is a specially dedicated page on the municipality’s website with a map of the location of the various public toilets, which, the website page states, are “available to everyone” and “are accessible to the disabled. They are almost all strategically located with respect to the main monuments of the historic center. Changing tables for toddlers are also available in many bathrooms.” Some are free and the others have “fees ranging from 0.20 cents to 1 euro.” We click on the link that refers us to the municipality’s official FeelFlorence tourist site where for each of the bathrooms there are specific directions including geo referenced map and hours. In some it is also indicated that they are “temporarily closed” so it avoids empty trips. Not in all is the exact price indicated, hopefully that means it’s free (!).

They range from the very central bathroom on Via Filippina, practically behind Palazzo Vecchio to even more decentralized areas or near parking lots or parks. Not to mention the legendary bathroom in the Santa Maria Novella train station, which between the 1980s and 1990s and was known throughout Italy as a place for same-sex sexual encounters. In the large station designed by architect Michelucci, there was just the right amount of goings-on to go unnoticed and enter the spacious bathrooms to meet halfway with one’s beau. It was sex free, now there is fixed garrison of the cleaning lady and to get in you have to put one euro at the turnstiles, the bathrooms next to platform 5 cost 1 euro if you can also pay by card.

The Albergo Diurno that was located under the Santa Maria Novella station at one time offered services “toilettte, toilets, barber, combing, manicure, pedicure, ironing, shoe shine, Turkish baths,” then was closed for long years and in 2014 underwent a complex restoration work that also included the Station’s refreshment room and today is home to a Feltrinellli chain bookstore with cafeteria. The work was supervised by the Superintendence for Architectural and Environmental Heritage of Florence and was of various types: restoration work on the Carrara marbles in the floors, the Alpi green marbles in the wainscoting, the wooden furniture and boiserie, period paintings and furnishings, and brass windows, fixtures and skylights. In the Restaurant Hall, now the central hall of the liberira, are two large canvases by Ottone Rosai, which have also been restored. Of note is the ’Santo Spirito Toilet’ complete with Red Lily sign in Piazza Santo Spirito, Oltrarno, and a popular youth hangout, which when it was opened was equipped with both a changing table and the baby food warmer, the “Baby Food Warmer.”

Where to go to the bathroom in art cities? Answers to the most frequently asked questions of tourists

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