The city of Lisbon, which was an important port of entrance for foreign products, played an important role in the diffusion of new tastes and habits. The tastes learned and the habits acquired were then transformed before finally being adopted by a number of other European courts in their ceremonial and courtly rituals.
The material culture that resulted from trade, which at first was disseminated among the elite, afterwards became accessible to another tier of the general population: commodities such as coffee, tea and chocolate became popular beverages, prompting the creation and adoption of new styles in the fine and applied arts, such as bureau cabinets to display porcelain. Sometimes the exotic and picturesque mingled, thus the concept of the exotic was in itself enlarged.