After connecting from Japan to Paris by Air France, I arrived safely at the small airport in Florence at 20:30. It had been a year since I had been to Italy.
When I immediately called the members of the exhibition team, they said they thought they were at the apartment where they were staying, but that they were about to have dinner at a trattoria. What? Why are they arriving so early? I asked.... I was right on time.
There was no one to go to the apartment, or rather, no key to get in, so I had no choice but to take a cab from the airport to a trattoria by Ponte Bettechio's with my large bags in my arms.
Osteria Cinghiale Bianco. Cinghiale is the Italian word for wild boar. This old trattoria is located in an artisan district crowded with various workshops.
The members had already started to eat, and I ordered the wild boar pappardelle (wide, flat pasta), just like the name of the restaurant.
It was a long trip from Japan and it was already morning, not midnight in Japan time, so I didn't have much of an appetite. (I forgot to take a picture.) I also drank a lot of wine.
Good espresso after dinner. The water is different. The aroma is different. It's delicious.
We arrived at our apartment around 11:00 p.m. We decided that we wanted to have a few more drinks. We decided that we wanted to have a few more drinks, so we went out in search of some wine, but all the stores were already closed, so we walked a little further to a pizzeria that was open until midnight. As we started drinking, the last member of the group finally arrived. All the members from Japan were safely assembled. After drinking and chatting for a while, we went to bed around 2:00 pm. I had been up all night before leaving Japan and had done a lot of other things on the plane, so I went to bed without a good night's sleep.
The next day, I woke up early in the morning to prepare for the exhibition starting tomorrow.
We borrowed a classroom at a school I used to attend when I was studying abroad to work on the display.
Like last year, this year's exhibition in Italy will be held on the wall of a trattoria (a small restaurant), so the works will be displayed in glass cases for wall display.
At noon, we went to Trattoria ACCADI, the venue for the event, for lunch after our meeting.
This trattoria is a small restaurant that serves traditional Florentine cuisine at reasonable prices,
We immediately eat penne with salciccia (Italian cured sausage) and red radicchio (a vegetable slightly larger than chicory) for primo, a meaty, unraveled sausage with a refreshing tomato flavor finish that is very tasty.
For seconds, I had a light carciofi (artichoke) salad. I enjoyed it with a slice of Parmigiano cheese and arugula, thinking that the simple style of combining the brightly flavored ingredients was typical of Italian cuisine, which is not available in Japan. Delicious.
I prepared for the exhibition all afternoon, rented a classroom at the school until 7 p.m., and then returned to my apartment to continue working on the exhibition.
Finally, tomorrow is the first day of the exhibition!
