"Pavimento in Legno?"

The current custom here is to use wood flooring in the "zona notte," (bedroom area). Neither Richard nor I know very much about wood flooring, except that we would like real hard wood flooring. In the process, we inquired several times as to wether the wood is "real," and each time, often by a different Italian, we were assured that it certainly is real wood. And, in the contract, the flooring is called "rovere," which means oak. Not wanting to ask the same question 10 times, we settled for the answer. Yesterday we went out to the wood floor contractor to select exactly what we wanted that falls within our contract.

Well -- wood to us and wood to an Italian is not exactly the same! I didn't see anything that we considered "real wood" anywhere in the showroom, but, hey, perhaps we are clueless. We were contracted to get this glue down natural oak stuff, but, luckily, it isn't possible with heated flooring. As a result, we were upgraded to a better product, but still natural oak, with no options for staining. We decided to change / upgrade to a wood called Doussie Africa.

The flooring is available in planks. The planks have about a 5 mm layer of wood glued (I suppose) to what appears to be plywood. The plywood has a tounge and groove apparatus used to connect it all together. The total thickness is 1 cm. The planks are 7 cm wide and from 40 to 70 cm long. The wood guy assured us that it can be refinished many times. He also told us that he has the same product in his house.

So, is it wood? "Real Wood?" We still don't know -- but it's what we get, and some variation of it is what is in nearly all new Northern Italian homes.