Throughout a newly affluent Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and under the spur of a technological revolution, people — country people, in particular — began to throw out their artefacts of wood and metal and natural fabric in favour of the exciting new plastic that never wore out and rarely needed cleaning. Newly-weds could have furnished their homes for a pittance from what, in Britain, were known as ‘junk shops’ — if they could face the embarrassment of living with somebody else’s grandmother’s chaise-longue or somebody else’s grandfather’s armchair.
Horse and cart gave way to the internal-combustion engine. Children’s table games gathered dust as the family clustered round the television screen. Local theatres struggled against the Cyclops of the sitting-room; even the once much derided cinema, now an art form, became an endangered species.
In Sicily, where poverty for the majority had stopped the clock until the post-war reforms, the effect was dramatic.
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