Day 32 Night out

Have stopped incessant sneezing. That makes it possible for me to join our hostess Paola, who is driving Barbara and Shay and me to Lecce for a big Saturday night out. Barbara and Shay are both painters and Paola’s friend runs a gallery in Lecce's centro storico and she's having an exhibit opening tonight.

Not that I  don't care for art but to be honest the real draw for me is going to dinner  afterward. So we're on our way out and I'll report later.
                                           
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The gallery itself was gorgeous.  But  I  didn't  understand  the exhibit, what artist  Domenico  Uccio Biondi was trying to express. I counted three life-size naked women, and a woman’s head and chest affixed to a canvas wearing a floor-length red skirt. Two of the sculptures wore funny goggles.

I tried getting a clue from the written material but couldn’t make heads or tails of that either: “il tempo vuole un bacio.”(Time wants a kiss). What the hell does that mean? Sometimes “art” is just too precious for my taste.

I tried reading the glossy program.  I really intended to try to understand but I guess I'm  not over my cold altogether because when I came across words like “incandescent,” “immortal” and “inexorable” I just didn't have the energy to continue.  

Much more  fun  was our  dinner, although we had a hard time finding a place to eat.  The old town was jammed.  In Lecce you need a reservation on a Saturday night.  But at 8:30 p.m., we finally found seats at a place called Amici Miei, where both Barbara and Paola had eaten before.  They did us a favour and let us in but there was a catch: We had to vacate the table by 9:30.

Appetizers for two, two pasta dishes, a salad and a bottle of rose wine called Five Roses and the four of us listed out of there exactly one hour later. Not even I had the nerve to utter the word “gelato” as we fought our way through the still growing crowds toward home. 



I didn't get what the artist was driving at but dinner (below) was a work of art.



Our pasta dishes included orecchiette with rapini and linguini with muscles and clams.