Full steam

Italians are serious about ironing. That's one of the (many) reasons why I'll never meet the housekeeping standard set by Italian housewives. I have never ironed bedsheets, towels, or underwear, and I never will. I do understand why Italian women iron all those things, though. Line-dried laundry is stiff, and ironing softens it. Very few households have clothes dryers, and I reckon that those that do, like mine, don't use them extensively because of the amount of energy they consume. Almost everything comes out of our dryer wrinkled, so it makes no sense using it to dry clothing, because it'd all have to be ironed anyway. (Fortunately, N seems unbothered by our wrinkled bedsheets.) I iron most of N's clothes, and some of mine. N needs neatly pressed t-shirts and jeans. I do not. I'm certainly not happy about all the additional ironing I have to do, but at least there's one good thing about ironing in Italy: il ferro da stiro a vapore. That translates as steam iron, but it's nothing like the so-called steam irons I used back home. That's our iron pictured above. It's attached by a cord to a base that contains a water tank and a heater. The combination of the big water tank and the powerful heater provides vast quantities of steam, meaning that even though I have more ironing to do than before, it doesn't take up that much more time. I wonder if these irons are only available in Italy, or if they're used elsewhere in Europe, too. Despite how well they work, I can't imagine them becoming very popular in the U.S., given how common dryers that don't wrinkle clothes are over there.