At the Royal Victoria Hotel in Pisa, the porter Primo Lucidi – immortalised in a photograph with the owner Andrea Piegaja and the transatlantic aviator Charles Lindbergh – was, shortly after being taken on, very proud to have scraped away with a chisel the ‘Ode alcomodo’ that the writer Cesare Pavese had lightly engraved on the marble slabs covering a toilet to celebrate, whilst using it, the fabulous ‘water closed’ (or ‘comodo’) of English manufacture, embellished with floral decorations, which – one of the first of its kind in Pisa – had been installed on one of the hotel’s floors. At that time, the bathrooms on each floor were shared by several rooms. The poor porter didn’t lose his job, but he never forgave himself for it. That decorated toilet, a ceramic masterpiece, is still preserved in the hotel, although it no longer works. The painter Lorenzo Viani was invited by a group of famous journalists to the Ristorante Erasmo in Ponte a Moriano: whilst everyone at the table was discussing all sorts of things, he amused himself by sketching with a charcoal pencil on the back of his plate, which he quickly turned over when the delicacies arrived at the table. When the table was cleared, my grandmother in the kitchen grumbled a great deal about how much she’d had to scrub to wash away all that black mark from the back of a plate!