Of course I’m obsessed with laundry — mine, and everybody else’s. Not to sound weird, but out in the rest of the world where clothes dryers are normal, your clothes do what you tell them to do.
Here, where you have only wind and sun to work with, the wet things have the upper hand; you have to learn to collaborate both with the elements and your garb. The time frame is different. Their behavior is different (do you want more heat, or more breeze? Have you got drenched denim or terrycloth? Will ironing later finish the job?). Maybe it’s because I’m used to a dryer that I have come to feel I have to adjust myself to their demands, and not vice versa.
I don’t know that everybody approaches their laundry in this way — people here have grown up with clotheslines — but I have to calculate how much the humidity is going to slow things down even if the sun is shining, while figuring that a cold, cloudy day can work out fine, if there’s the right wind. Not too cold a day, of course; one winter evening I took in the towels and they were frozen hard as boards. Which wouldn’t matter except that when they defrosted, they were wet again.
I also have to take into account the fact that the sun shines directly on my clothesline for just about one hour from noon to 1:00 PM, depending on the season. Those precious 60 minutes have to be made to count. I position the underwear in the sun with more precise calculation than any woman on the beach developing her tan.
As all the world know, Monday morning is sacred to laundry. But yesterday morning must have been the date, unknown to me, of some sacred ritual, because every calle in the neighborhood was festooned with laundry. It seemed that everybody (man or woman) had received some occult signal and washed everything in their house.
IT WAS DAZZLING! They ought to make it an annual festival! I’ll bring my mattress pad, hooded bathrobe, waffle-weave blanket, and five pairs of jeans and join the bacchanal. Or are those at night? Never mind. I’ll be there just the same. Maybe there’ll be a bonfire I can dance around, flapping my soggy beach towel.
14 Comments
I miss so much about living in Italy, but not doing the laundry. In the U.S., the ability to do four large loads of laundry before noon is still a source of wonder to me two years after our return from Italy. Right now we are traveling in northern Italy and I have to think about laundry daily again. Che fastidioso!
Erla! I loved this post, especially the last photo. You are very funny in a nice way! I like that the smart people of Venice have always just hung the laundry out to dry. Why did I think they might have dryers inside their houses? We should all do that and scrap the dryers although, living in the Rocky Mountains, it would be hard to dry the clothes in the winter. I could get one of those collapsible racks and position it in front of the woodstove. We think more and more about how to live more “sustainably” these days. This morning my husband said, “We might not always have water, you know.” Yes, I know. We are positioned right at the edge of a large wilderness area, where, supposedly, it does and will snow a lot and that is what provides our water from the well. Does Venice simply use the water from the lagoon for its water source? You have probably talked about that but I don’t remember the answer. I hope they don’t have to pipe it in from far away.
Thanks for the very nice note. Well, if you walk around the city you certainly see enough laundry hanging out every day to guess that most people don’t have dryers. (I take my heavy stuff to the laundromat once or twice a year and use the dryer there.) I can’t speak for everybody, but I know that dryers take up space, which is always at a premium, and also electricity, similarly at a premium. The water in the lagoon comes in twice a day from the Adriatic Sea, so it’s too salty to drink. Here’s the link to the post I wrote about the water supply: https://iamnotmakingthisup.net/29392/drink-up-the-aqueduct-today/ Anyway, it’s mostly groundwater, so no, it doesn’t come from far away.
I have tons of photos of laundry in Venice.It’s one of the most beautiful things as are your photos of it.
I grew up in southern California where my mother washed on Monday and hung everything on the clothes line my father built for her in the back yard. She didn’t have a dryer till I left home. And then she only used it if she had to. She couldn’t understand why it took so long to dry in that machine. I discovered the problem one time when I was visiting and had to use it starting with my usual check of the lint trap and found that in probably 10 years she had never cleaned the lint trap. I did try to explain that is why machines come with directions….which most of us never read. Yes, her dryer was much more efficient after that.
The times I have visited Venice I’ve stayed in apartments that have a machine that is a washer dryer combo…wash and dry inside the same machine. Of course the knobs which have way too many selections are in Italian as are the book of directions. Really, I found and checked the lint trap but my undies still took several hours to dry. About the same amount of time it takes hanging them on a line in the sun.
I love looking at laundry drying on a line….I still intensely dislike doing laundry with or without a dryer. And I’m sorry to say when I take my photos of the lovely laundry in Venice I never thought of all of the concentration it takes to get it just right. I’ll think of you every time I see it hanging on the line now.
I had no idea there were so many memories and experiences connected to laundry! Thanks! Though I have to say that I don’t know that anybody else concentrates on their laundry with the intensity I devote to it. I’ve seen people leave their laundry out in the fog, which is submission to elemental forces that I cannot imagine. Fog actually makes your clothes wetter than when you put them out. PS: Nice work with the lint trap.
This brings to mind my husband’s stories of the Canadian Prairie, specifically living on the outskirts of Edmonton.
His mother had a hand cranked washer and a hand cranked water squeezer outer, (mangle? aptly named, if so, because of what it can do to little fingers) a bigger version of a pasta flatten-er thingy. She hung her laundry in the south facing back yard, year round. In winter everything freeze dried. It was brought in side to finish drying around the wood stove. They had to be careful handling the linens so as not to break them in transport.
Beautiful photos. Lovely whimsical writing.
Breaking the laundry? This is a sublime new level of attention that would be required of your humble washerperon(s). Thanks so much for the glimpse of the not-so-distant past. Suddenly I feel more like a pioneer than I did this morning!
I have a book (which I haven’t yet read), The politics of washing: real life in Venice, by Polly Coles. I’d better check it out.
We try never to use our dryer. If you inspect the filter afterwards, you see how much fabric dryers take out of towels and sheets, shortening their life. I’d be too frightened and shy to visit a laundromat. The laundry of Venice tells so many stories, and some gear has interesting slogans too.
I take your point about the filter, but if you have waited three days for something to completely dry, and if you’re tired of standing there touching it, asking yourself over and over “Is it dry? Or am I just imagining it because I have to use it now?” the risk of shortening the object’s life loses some importance. As for fear and timidity, I hear you — but you should rid yourself of them regardless of laundromats, in my view. Life is indeed too short to let those hold you back, unless you’re contemplating a demonstrably life-threatening activity. Why not start with facing down the laundromat and move on to even more impressive things. I’d appreciate it if you’d save the world.
I’d better read The politics of washing: real life in Venice, by Polly Coles, which I have somewhere about the house.
I love walking down the Corte Nova (off via Garibaldi) on a sunny Monday. It reminds me so much of my great grandperants home in Foley Street North Dublin. I wish there was a little bacari in the corte so I could sit there awhile. This area of Castello for me is so beautiful, I would move there tomorrow were it not for my family. Grazie per il ricordo, Brian.
Once upon a time was there not a tradition of hanging out the wedding night bed linens to let the world know that 1) the marriage had been consumated (no spell check!?) and 2) the bride was a virgin?
I do like the saying “washing your dirty linen in public”. Such a refined way of saying “having a ‘Domestic’ in the street”.
Thank you so much for your helpful shearing post!
I do imagine that you have heard of the awful “homeowners associations” we have here in the states. One of the usual regulations is “NO CLOTHESLINES ALLOWED.” No, one is not “allowed” to hang out laundry to dry. I absolutely hated living in the new subdivision where we bought a brand new and large house in 1995. They even objected to my daughter’s cute little playhouse, handbuilt by her daddy and moved to the new house by bobcat. We were allowed to keep it but only if we painted it the same “tasteful grey” color of the house. No Air Force Blue allowed. So unpatriotic! Anyway, the very day we moved way out in the country to our little cabin in the woods, I washed some laundry and hung it on the pasture fence. I really did feel that I was liberated and was so happy I could do that! Wherever I roam, I love to see laundry drying in the wind. It’s a sort of honest, decent thing to do, I think.
One last note. There have even been movements by people to make local regulations allow drying clothes outside. I can’t find the website right now, though, since it has been a few years since I discovered it. Yes, laundry is a BIG topic!