The objects we passed our time with when children, the nursery rhymes we hopped and jumped to and the rules for our races define us in some way, and they certainly tell us about the pastimes of children years ago, when there was time and open spaces They had few toys but lots of imagination that seems to take us back far off in time, from generation to generation, to hills and streams in a landscape crossed by roads with no traffic, rare houses and farms with open attics full of every kind of marvellous thing. A walnut shell or a piece of paper was sufficient to set off for the sea, a fine thread to weave around one’s fingers to design a kaleidoscope of geometric figures sufficient to pass hours and hours, a bit of sand and a bag of multicoloured marbles to organize endless contests on circuits that were studied at length (and the construction of the mythical perfect race track became a game in itself). Each of these tesserae of memory open up, like one of those wooden Russian dolls which contained little by little different and smaller ones, and compose a real account of how we were when things were almost never thrown away but repaired (almost always). When waste was a real crime and eco stood for economical: even if, in the final analysis, everything was definitely more eco-logical and, in some way, righter.