One of the final chapters of The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa is set during a grand ball attended by Palermo’s high society. Hundreds of men and women are dancing, flirting, scheming, eating and drinking the night away. Toward the end of the ball, as it starts to get light, everyone is getting tired:
Their visits to a disordered little room near the band alcove became more frequent; in it was disposed a row of twenty vast vats, by that time nearly all brimful, some spilling over.
No water closets in this 1860s Sicilian Palazzo. Similarly, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, set in a Swiss luxury spa around 1904, describes the terrible state of the shared toilet facilities. And it wasn’t just the European literary imagination: When the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco opened in 1907, it instantaneously was the city’s most prestigious place to stay, and it didn’t offer private bathrooms.
Of course, nowadays every budget motel does.
Nehaveigur 