3rd/4th Story - How Smeraldo Was Discovered
For more about the Smeraldo blog, click here.
Please do not repost my translations. Links to the page are appreciated. Translated by @courtneylazore.
This post was originally published as the 3rd story in 2017, then deleted from the blog and reuploaded in 2018. The post was deleted again and reuploaded in 2020 as the 4th story.
Today I’ll tell you how the smeraldo, ‘the flower of legend,’ came into the world. Actually five years ago at a playing card society event was the first time I heard of the legend of smeraldo, and it was established that the smeraldo only existed in legends.
(I’ll make a post later about how the smeraldo and playing cards are related.)
But it was on a summer day, I received some surprising news. I still remember that day vividly. I got up in the morning and washed my face, then the phone rang. The person on the phone was a friend I had met when I accidentally attended an academic event about playing cards.
This friend and I happened to listen to a lecture together and became fascinated by the smeraldo flower, and we’ve continued exchanging news since then. I lived in North Dakota, and my friend lived in San Francisco, but because we liked the same thing, the distance wasn’t a problem.
To return to the point, the news that friend called with was that the smeraldo flower had actually been found. I couldn’t say anything for a while, and then we both grabbed onto the phone and yelled.
The picture above shows the site where the smeraldo was first discovered. Even now, when I look at that photo, my heart pounds.
Amtest(amare_0) was an Instagram user famous for travel photos. While traveling in the northern part of Italy, they uploaded a photo of the flower they discovered by chance. In fact, amtest(amare_0) didn’t know anything about the smeraldo flower and only thought of it as a unique and beautiful flower they encountered while traveling. But some people who saw the photo on Instagram brought up its similarities to the smeraldo flower, and the story spread like wildfire. And a local historian released this crucial information: the old forgotten name of the place where the flower was found was “La Città di smeraldo.”
La Città di smeraldo means “the city of smeraldo” in Italian. According to the historian, that area had a prosperous village in the Middle Ages, but it was abandoned when the Black Death swept through, and now it’s a forested area.
Soon after, experts from various florist and botanical societies around the world were sent to the location, and they announced that the flowers were officially smeraldos.
At the time, the smeraldo made a fervent sensation in Europe and the U.S. Each country tried to cultivate the smeraldo locally, but the smeraldo could only bloom in the “city of smeraldo” and has not been successfully grown in other places. There have been different theories as to why, but nothing has been revealed yet. Even today, smeraldos are only grown on farms in northern Italy and exported in small quantities to Europe, North America, and some parts of Asia.
But aren’t you curious as to how great the smeraldo is that it created a “fervent” sensation?
In the next post, I’ll tell you the tangled story of the smeraldo.