Has anyone ever pulled one of those strings and actually had someone show up at their door?

Yes, I have seen the strings several times but i have never pulled them. In fact, i have warned my travel companions to not pull the strings, but on two separate occasions, people with whom I was traveling felt the need to pull the string. One guy thought it was the way to flush the toilet. <BR> <BR>Regardless, both times the owner of the hotel rushed to our door and asked whether we were ok because he received the emergency signal. <BR> <BR>Do not pull the string unless you are having a heart attack or something.

I've always wondered why Italian hotels seem so much more worried about someone having an emergency in the shower than hotels in any other place. I've never seen these emergency cords anywhere except Italy.

Think about it... what if you are having a heart attack while sitting on bidet?

Many years ago, while on a three-day pass up from the fleet in the Mediterranean, I stayed in a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland. I took a shower and pulled that little string out of curiosity. Attired only in my dog tags, I was greeted by a knock on the door, the turn of the key, and a most-embarrassed chambermaid.

Believe it or not, we had a very long thread about this around a year ago. My son was showering in Venice. I kept hearing this buzzing in the hotel hallway..it was him. He called to me a minute later to ask what the string was for.

We actually used it as a clothesline late one afternoon. We went out to dinner and came back about 5 hours later. We were back about 10 minutes when the phone rang. The night clerk said something about an alarm, and my husband thought he was asking if we wanted a wakeup call the next morning. (Neither of the two gentlemen were very conversant in the other's language). Eventually my hubby realized what the clerk was talking about so he could tell him "OH! No, no problem, our mistake"