The examples I'm talking of were in a dserted village in the Toscana, the wiring was probably very old. New work seems to use stranded wire in conduit. With the limitations, I guess it may be better in cities, I only know wiring in very rural areas. 10 years ago they used oil lamps and propane gas lighting there, some people still do.
They simply have both types of plugs, they're sold everywhere. The ones for 16A have also slightly thicker prongs, everything else looks the same.
The Euro works, but it's difficult. Some machines (like the public xerox machine I wanted to use today still only take our old Schilling coins, and some things get (illegally) slightly more expensive due to the changes. (They just round up the prices to a nice Euro sum)
Yes, that's what work is usually done around here. We have mostly plastered brick walls, so wiring dangling around in hollow spaces is quite uncommon (even in plaster-and-lath ceilings we usually use conduit (Almost only PVC flex conduit) Here in Austria we also use Romex in plaster, but conduit is the better choice for adding wires afterwards. On my opinion it is sometimes scaring what you see in America (especially that nice variety of adaptors and taps they sell at Home Depot, or homemade extensions like "how do I make one cord with more recptacles out of 2". Tht happens everywhere but I'm sometimes tempted to think that some Americans may pay less attention towards electricity due to the lower voltage.
I don't want to offend anyone, there are many people there who think a lot about safety, it was just scary to travel around there and see stuff like that.
