The best night for the opening of the Jester 2023 festival could only be the one we spent yesterday in a piazza Mazzini – more and more the piazza Locanda del Giullare – kept in the dark with the complicity of the municipal administration. The “Metti una sera a cena” that took place yesterday had all the ingredients that animate the spirit of everything revolves around the Jester of Trani: dinners “in the dark”, blindfolded, to simulate the absence of sensation to stimulate the others. but also to identify with the condition of those who cannot see, is a widespread fashion.

But if the chef, Antonio Ciotola, already named among the forty best chefs in Italy, went blind 15 years ago. if the impeccable service is entrusted to the young people of Locanda, children suffering from Down syndrome, autism or other “specialities”, as we rightly learn to call them. then again, if gastronomy is an art through which it is also possible to overcome all obstacles, then last night’s dinner in the dark was truly a unique and extraordinary opportunity offered by the Jester Festival.

What you “see” when you close your eyes and sleep has become normal for me – said Antonio Ciotola: “But for me darkness has become a tool of meditation, reflection and even lightness”: between smiles, fun and new perceptions the chef from the Marches has embellished with his interventions the experience lived by a hundred people who dined wearing a black mask and enhancing their touch, smell, taste to recognize the delicacies he had prepared with the collaboration of his friend chef Antonio Bedini and the jester’s chef Enzo Lorusso.

Brilliant entertainment of the evening Francesco Donato who presented the evening welcoming the protagonists from the deputy mayor Ferrante from the consultant of social services Rondinone, recalling the increasingly important commitment of the Municipality in favor of possibilities for the lives of people with disabilities and families, in an authentic integration and not a facade as is too often the case. but who acted as a link between Antonio and the guests he “interrogated” at the end of the dinner, when unmasked the dishes appeared on a large screen and relived with attempts to identify what he had eaten. “We definitely enjoyed what was on our plates in a more conscious way,” “How much more time seemed to pass between taking the glass and bringing it to our lips.” and again “I spilled the sauce on my pants: when the chef invited me to smell I brought the plate to my nose not knowing that it was a wet plate I literally “poured”. Here, among smiles, well-being, stories about the food told in Antonio’s, dinner in the dark was a new opportunity to understand what it means not to see, what discomfort it entails, what embarrassments it often causes but also what new perceptions are possible for those who believe they can see and hear freely. “traditional” senses, the other four to be clear: but above all our sensitivity to our neighbor, the sense of respect, the authentic sharing.A more beautiful life for all, the one that was the world of Trani’s jester searching for fifteen years in from the arts of construction.