Snjezana | January 17, 2025 | Vrijeme čitanja: 2 min.

Rules and laws

RULES AND LAWS- written 2018

I consider this as a 2^nd blog, which was written seven years ago…….

I live in Croatia, where many things are regulated by the laws of European Union, or so we were told. The same goes with the rules for the toilets in a restaurant or a bar. By the European Law, that applies in Croatia also, every restaurant or a bar must have a toilet for a woman and a man, separated. Otherwise, an owner cannot get a permit to open a restaurant.

As we started traveling to Italy often in the last two-three years it was a big surprise for us to discover fashion of toilets in some places.

In some restaurants there was only one toilet for both women and men.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 26.09.2021.-Castiglione-del-Lago-Italy-1-1024x768.jpg

Photo: 26.09.2021. Castiglione del Lago, Italy – I didn’t get what the partition at the urinal was for

Photos: 26.09.2021. Castiglione del Lago, Italy – the same toilet from above. I like “beautiful angel”

Having said that, Italian’s cities are old, streets are narrow, houses are on top of each other, buildings are old, one can only imagine how hard was to install pluming and other infrastructure in such old houses and buildings.

But excuse me, a restaurant that caters for maybe sixty-seventy guests has only one toilet. Really???

One restaurant had three separated boots, each boot had a door, but the side walls were built not to the celling. There was a gap about forty centimeters between wall and the celling, between each boot. On the last door in the row was a paper attached on the door with a sticky tape. The paper had written on – UOMO (MAN). The other two boots were presumably for the women, but no one can tell. If a man was waiting and the Loo was free, I assume he would go in.

Mind you, I wrote that 7 years ago, when we still had separated male-female toilets, and me being brought up old fashioned I was amazed.

Four years later we were in Orahovica, Croatia. The bar had good prices for drinks, and soon I needed a loo.

Photos: 06.01.2022. Orahovica, Croatia

Toilet was very clean, but someone was witty, and put out the sign that would fit perfectly in the Italian toilet, described before!

I’m not sure what the law said about toilets and access for disabled people, but many of them are not fitted for them. More sadly, many of them are in the basement or on the first floor of a restaurant, with lots of stairs. Not only in Italy.