On Her Majesty's Privy Service

 We like to think that we have many friends and well-wishers here at the Privy Counsel. They tend to come thick and fast whenever we require elucidation, or solace. However, recently they've been, so to speak, thicker and faster than usual. One Privy Counsel fan, for instance, invited us to spend a week grappling a bottle of gin with James Bond in a hotel bar, and simultaneously check out the toilets of the Italian Alps. James Bond, of course, has a history of Alp-related lavatory shenanigans. We leave it to our undoubtedly brainy audience to find the interesting bits themselves, and content ourselves with an only mildly bog-related quote from On Her Majesty's Secret Service:

"His two battered suitcases came and he unpacked leisurely and then ordered from Room Service a bottle of the Taittinger Blanc de Blancs that he had made his traditional drink at Royale. When the bottle, in its frosted silver bucket, came, he drank a quarter of it rather fast and then went into the bathroom and had an ice-cold shower and washed his hair with Pinaud Elixir, that prince among shampoos, to get the dust of the roads out of it."
(from Jamesbondlifestyle.)

James Bond's style of travelling is, we suspect, quite different from our own: when we go to the Alps we concentrate rather less on drinking out of frosted silver buckets, and more on taking pictures of the varied and often baffling kinds of plumbing contraptions. For instance, we simply cannot get enough of the allaturca toilet, or gabinetto or vaso alla turca, as featured below. We still do our fair share of wild chases down mountain sides with bullets flying left, right, and centre, however.

A pretty accurate representation of our recent holiday.
Image from Betweentheseats

We have mentioned before the inadvisability of using an Italian allaturca toilet
when wearing ski boots and in possession of shredded-to-tiny-pieces knee ligaments.
This time, luckily, we only had the ski boots to contend with.
The flush cistern isn't visible in this photo, but you can see the pipe.
And there's a toilet shower, too, if you're so inclined!

Mixer tap, lovely soap, and paper towels make for a very happy toilet blogger!

This middle-of-the-piste bar was called Orsa Maggiore,
and had an amusing bear pointing the way to the toilets.

This toilet gets, probably, undici or duodice points. Two eagerly gesticulating thumbs up! Stay tuned for more Italian toilets, including train toilets!

Related Reading:
Italian Toilets: Mi Piace Servizi Igienici
The Disabled Toilet in the Physiotherapy Department at York Hospital
Dizzying heights of Toilet Perfection
Finally! An Italian Train!