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By the 1960s we begin to see far fewer children coming to school barefoot and the practice began to be seen as related to poverty. Sandals and fip-flops were very common. While many children had some form of footwear, quite a few children did not wear some kind of hosiery. An Italian reader tells us, "There is something strange about the class photo here (figure 1). It was taken in Carbonia during the 1963-64 school year at the Mazzini primary school. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72), depicted in the photo on the wall, was a primary figure in the fight dor the unification of Italy. Even many prmary schools were single gender schools. The boys pose in two rows. We cannot see the legs and feet of almost all the boys in the back row. It seems to me that the only explanation is that the photographer removed these parts during the photo printing process. I don't know why he would have done that. The only reason that seems plausible to me is that the children were barefoot and they wanted to avoid showing that. In the front row, all of the children are wearing some kind of footwear (one boy is wearing only clogs). Carbonia is a town in southern Sardinia. It was built in the 1930s to provide housing for the families of the workers in the nearby mines. The name Carbonia comes from the Italian word 'carbone' which means coal." An Itaian reader tells is, "Here we have further evidence of trasformation in Carbonia in the 1960s (figure 1). This photo was taken in the middle of the decade. All the pupils are wearing school smocks. Two boys are wearing flip flops. Probably a few years earlier they would have been barefoot." Another Italian reader repots, "I went to primary school in a town near Milan during the 1960s. Neither I nor my classmates ever wore flip-flops to school, although we often wore them outside of school. I think that was fairly common throughout northrrn Italy. In contrast in some places like those small Sardinian towns, even in the 1960s, it was still no problem for a child to go to school barefoot."
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