And never, ever, leave the rubbish out the door. This is a tidal city. Get it? The fine for leaving your waste at the mercy of the elements is €167 ($271), which will, naturally, be added to your rental bill along with an extra cleaning fee. (Last week's highest tide since 1966 and ensuing floods prove why it really isn't a good idea to leave rubbish out.)

Some tourists complain they need a PhD to work out the Italian waste disposal and recycling rules, but thankfully we had already travelled through other beautiful (and clean) spots, and were getting used to seeing the country's six rubbish bins.

There's one for organic matter, another for glass, one for paper, another for cardboard, a fifth for plastic, and one for unsorted dry waste (as in, none of the above). They were squeezed into our Rome apartment, nestled in a discreet corner of an amazing deck overlooking the sea in Vernazza at Cinque Terre, and dotted around the public squares of most towns in an industrial form with subterranean skip bins.

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It's perhaps not surprising. The European Union, like Australia, hit the Chinese roadblock to waste disposal on January 1, when the world's most populous country decided it had enough of its own rubbish and stopped importing everyone else's for recycling.

What happened next in Europe was heavier investment in both the quantity and quality of European processing plants where waste is turned into new products, Dr Karl Williams, head of the centre for waste and resource management at the University of Central Lancashire, told our correspondent Nick Miller in May. Europeans are also better at separating waste, which means better prospects and higher prices for recycled products, he said.

Stastica.com figures show Italians have progressively lowered the volume of waste generated per capita. In 2010, each inhabitant of "the Boot" generated 536 kilograms of waste. By 2017, they had reduced it to just under 490 kilograms.

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Recycling and state-of-the art waste disposal systems are not universal in Europe, let alone in Italy - recycling rates here reportedly vary from more than 90 per cent in some cities, to less than 10 per cent in others - but on the tourist trail we carved, we couldn't escape the six bins.

Some places also have those container deposit machines that pay you coins for feeding them plastic and/or glass, while at least one council issues residents with magnetic cards to open public bins and ensure waste is disposed of correctly.

Perhaps we can add state-of-the-art recycling to the long list of things the Romans have done for us.