Before the age of internet, facebook and twitter, the following article was written almost twenty years ago in Fosciandora, a tiny comune of 720 inhabitants further up in the mountains of Garfagnana.
A new hypermarket had just been opened down in the valley and was offering a free bus service to people in Garfagnana if they shopped at the hypermarket.
That service to the community did not last for long but then neither did the tiny shops and bars in the comune either.
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The klaxon which sounded through the valley a few years ago did not just warn motorists of an oncoming bus, it also sounded an alarm to the whole community that things were changing.
Life would never be the same again.
The new religion – consumerism, with its creed of profit margin and market forces was making itself heard right here in the community.
Progress.
The evolution that moves from small shop to large store to supermarket and finally to hypermarket seems evidence enough of progress.
All we have to do is board the bus and shop at the new hypermarket down in the valley.
Big is beautiful.
With the enormous bulk buying power available to the hypermarket their goods are more varied and cheaper than if we shop at smaller local stores, but was there something else lost on the way?
Is there a correlation between the arrival of the hypermarket bus and the eventual closing down of the small shops and bars in the community?
The fabric of the community is being considerably weakened by these closures.
On the one hand, just at the time when governments around Europe are starting to think of infrastructures that do not involve the car quite so heavily, here we are becoming even more dependent on it and on the other hand, its the loss of the social function that these shops and bars used to fulfil that is so damaging.
They were meeting places where opinions and information was freely passed between people on a daily basis.
This criss-crossing of threads of information, built up layer upon layer to become part of the tapestry that is life in this community.
Allowing them to wither away has removed a large part of the infrastructure that holds us all together.
We are in danger of becoming more and more isolated from each other.
An interesting phenomenon is that in countries where the evolution up to the enormous hypermarkets took place during the late 70s and early 80s there is already a move back to smaller local shops.
When the full cost to the community is taken into account, lo and behold, it seems that the smaller shops and bars might even be more efficient.
Maybe small is beautiful after all