Claudia, were enemas a common treatment for constipation back in those days? Only bulbs were used or did people also use cans or bags?
I give for granted that your questions relate to Italian habits in the recent past.
In our families the enema has never been used as an usual tool for bowel periodic cleansing, let alone weekly or even daily. Always its use has mostly been limited to cases of persistent constipation or when, staying in bed sick for several days, bowel functions are slowed down too. Usually these conditions are more common in childhood, so here kids have always been more subject than adults to get enemas. In course of time, even if became available a lot of orally laxative products, the parents continue to feel safer giving their kids an enema or, as an alternative, some glycerin suppository if can work as well.
As regards the enema equipment, for several decades in our families have been used mainly two instruments: the "peretta" (= little pear) and the "irrigatore" (= gravity irrigator). The peretta is the equivalent of the enema bulb, that's an orange rubber pear with a thin hard rubber nozzle, whose capacity goes from 100 cc to 1,250 cc. The old irrigatore used until a short time ago was an open-top cylinder of glass inside a metal stand, with at the bottom a tap connected to a long rubber tube ending with the nozzle. Its maximum capacity is 3 liters and has to be hand-held or placed on a shelf, higher than the receiver's butt. More recently this old irrigatore has been replaced with a new one, which instead of the rigid container has a PVC foldable bag and can be hung to any hook. Currently this latter model has a greater diffusion than the previous in our families, probably because also equipped with a different nozzle which makes it a very handy vaginal irrigator. As you can see, the rubber flat enema bag - elsewhere so much common and appreciated - in my country has had an use of little relevance, practically limited to the brief period between the tardy disused of our old irrigatore and the adoption of the new one.
Before concluding, I want to emphasize that all the foregoing regards exclusively the "conventional" use of the enema in our families during the last two or three generations. Obviously the matter is quite different when we talk about the enema used as a fetish object and as a tool to get excited in sexual role plays. I don't know what was the situation in the past about the enema used for these purposes, however I can say that at present all the appropriate equipments are readily available anywhere and that in my country the feelings and behaviors of klismos are the same as any other part of the world.