When in Italy, do press the red button

Notes from our Italian vacation.

The train had stopped at our destination, Orte. We stood bewildered in front of the door looking frantically for a way to open it. People were piling up behind us. Finally, someone from behind reach around and turned a red lever and the door opened. The lever was right in front of us, but we did not see it.

A similar thing happened when we tried to leave a B&B in Siena. The B&B shared an entrance with some private residences and had a complicated system of locks on the door. We stared at it for minutes, ignoring the red button in the middle. Only when it was clear there was nothing else that could activate the mechanism did we dare press the red button.

The buttons on Italian buses to indicate your stop are red. So are the push-bars on public doors. Basically, Italians appear to mark a control red to call attention to it, not to warn people away from it. So conditioned were we to the US convention that controls marked red are for emergency use only that we struggled for some time just to be able to see them.

- J