Nobody Slept Here

We were walking Ivrea in the evening, a friend and I, with no plan beyond the town itself — the brick towers up on the hill, the bridges, the Dora Baltea coming down out of the mountains that particular chalky green that glacial water is. And then I looked over a railing and stopped, because there was a roof below me.

Not a basement. A whole long building, one storey of windows, standing on the bare rock at the edge of the river with the street running along the top of it and cars parked on what was effectively its ceiling. It faced the water. Nothing about it faced the town. And across the front, in letters the plaster had almost finished eating: ALBERGO DIURNO.

Day hotel. Nobody ever slept there.

I went and read about it afterwards, and the idea turns out to be simple and completely of its moment. A businessman from Bologna saw London’s public facilities in 1911, came home, and built the same thing under an Italian street. A floor below the pavement you could get a bath, a shave, a haircut, your laundry done, a phone call, your currency changed, a train ticket. You paid by the service. A tub cost more than a shower.

You paid to take a shower here.

It worked because homes didn’t have bathrooms yet. By the sixties most of them did, and the whole proposition quietly stopped meaning anything. The ones that weren’t gutted got sealed up and forgotten about.

Inside

We came back the next day, in flat grey light, and got in.

It is one long hall running parallel to the river. On the left, a row of tall windows over the water — some still glazed, one sash still swinging on its hinge — and through them the round balconied block on the far bank, so the view out of the shower rooms is better than the view out of most apartments in the town. On the right, the wall is white tile, patched with bare brick where the cubicles were pulled out. The ceiling is exposed concrete beams, which is not what a bath house from 1911 looks like, so somebody rebuilt this at some point and then walked away from it too.

The floor is small pale tile, gritty, growing weeds along the base of the tiled wall. Somebody has been in here recently — a broom, a stack of boards, a table, a pot plant on the step — but nothing has actually been done.

And then the far end. The building simply runs out. The plaster and the brick stop and there is a face of grey rock standing there instead, wedged up under the concrete, with a stone staircase climbing past it and a sumac growing out of the base in a great green fountain. They didn’t cut the hill back to make a room. They put a roof on the hill and called it one.

That is what a floor below the street means here. Half of it is the cliff.