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Comment by Red_Tarsius | Hacker News Reader

>peeing against houses was considered a bit rude but somewhat normal in a pinch.

I find that statement misleading. No, peeing against houses was/is not a socially accepted behaviour in Italy, at least not where I lived. Normal implies some degree of acceptance. You can receive a hefty fine for indecent behavior and people don't react well when drunk rowdy students "tag" their turf.

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To be fair I grew up in a northern Italian town (~5 000 people) in the 00's and we had a few "peeing spots," usually windowless (north) walls of old houses in the historical center. We rarely peed there--as the GP put it, we only did when "in a pinch."

Coincidentally, toilets in old houses there were really just small rooms jutting out of the northern part of the building that had a hole at the bottom where the waste would just plop down into the soil. Maybe that's where the habit started?

Also the only time somebody got fined for peeing was when one of the local troublemakers peed on a prominent flagpole in the middle of the day--it made it into the local newspaper's locandina :)

I said "somewhat normal", "a bit rude", and "in the '80s".

I could bet you a billion old Lira that, if you went to a periferia today and asked around, you'd find that it still happens. Obviously it won't happen in gentrified areas and touristic city centres, where I'm sure the municipale (or whatever they're called today in this or that region) is focused on maintaining the honor and decoro of the city. But in the areas nobody really cares about? For sure.

When I first arrived in Bologna ten years ago, I vividly remember an old man at the side of a main road peeing into the bushes.

In Centrale o in Bolognina? "Fun" areas...

I grew up in what was then called la Pescarola (Zanardi / Marco Polo / Agucchi).

Nope, I know from experience that peeing in public is very common in piazzas in the center at night because everyone is driving beer and the are no public facilities and bars generally have a single (often filthy) toilet for all their customers to share :)

But that's different. This was near Lunetta Gamberini in broad daylight :) To be fair it's not something I've seen since.

Bologna can be weird. I remember speaking with someone who'd spent his military service there, and his first words where "such a dirty and criminal city". That's not what the stats say or what the classic image of the city is (nor what my experience generally was, growing up there), but obviously stats are not the full picture and heaven does not exist.

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