A few months have passed by since a crowd of more than four hundred process-mining enthusiasts from the world over joined us in Rome for ICPM 2023! Memories are still vivid. We take the chance to look back at it and share what we saw from our perspective (and with a tinge of nostalgia).

One of the pictures that will be difficult to wash away from our mind was the view we had while walking around the Auditorium. We say it full as we had hardly ever experienced before, especially with a crowd captured by the mesmerising talk of Marlon Dumas. Quite stunning, indeed. Like the day before, with the brilliant discourse of Avi Gal for his keynote opening the conference's research track. The actual start was further twenty-four hours earlier, with the workshop day and that feeling of excitement and anxiety intertwined together. The latter faded a bit away when we saw flocks of participants almost literally flying from one room to the next to take the most out of the abundant parallel events! In the meantime, staff from our sponsors were at work to get the booths and installations ready (by the way, sincerely thank you all for the extraordinary support!), and our audio media partner of Mining Your Business set up their mini-recording studio. Oh yes, we even had a podcast covering the event! This year, we reached a composite audience made of representatives of academia and industry in equal proportions. Indeed, another memorable figure in our mind is the view of the experts from companies and organisations gathered together to forge brand-new ideas and innovation directions amid minimalistic rooms and aisles surrounded by bulky engines and metal bars in a revisited early 20th-century industrial architecture. All of that was just before the Ph.D. and the post-industrial parties started! Speaking of idea forgeries, it was so rewarding to see the week move towards its conclusion, with so many young researchers gathering together for the doctoral consortium!

It is certainly a pleasant effort to fetch remembrances and feelings from our memory. However, they are ephemeral in nature. Scripta manent. Luckily, we can know more about the research contributions that were brought up and revive the related discussions by accessing the proceedings online. Also, the slide decks of the excellent presentations are available and reachable from the ICPM 2023 website. The presented works were stunning, to the extent that the Chairs introduced new awards to highlight not only the technical or presentation quality of a work, but also the ingenuity behind it.

As General Chairs, we had the pleasure and opportunity of working with a fabulous team of motivated people, without whom all this would have never taken place. We thank all of them: the steering committee of the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining, in particular Boudewijn van Dongen; our research group and especially Valerio Goretti and Luca Barbaro, working hard as web masters and artwork designers for the occasion, Jacopo Rossi, Matteo Marinacci, and Angelo Casciani for the matchmaking application, and Giuseppe Perelli, our Proceedings Chair; the PC Chairs (Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, Arik Senderovich, and Jorge Munoz-Gama) and the whole Program Committee for ascertaining that the research track proceedings reported on top-quality research outcomes and for crafting a rich programme with presentations of the latest findings in our field; the Workshop Chairs (Pnina Soffer and Johannes De Smedt), organisers and reviewers for making the Workshop Day a vibrant event with an abundance of rising ideas and investigations on several themes around process mining; the Demo Track Chairs (Laura Genga and Francesco Leotta) and their jury for organising a showcase of tools allowing researchers and practitioners apply the most recent techniques and algorithms; the XES/OCED Working Group (led by Moe Wynn), for bringing forward the evolution of the crucial event process data model and rethinking its rationale towards an object-centric perspective; the Doctoral Consortium Chairs (Cristina Cabanillas and Jan Martijn van der Werf) and their committee of bright experts in the field for contributing to the flourishing of next-generation brilliant minds in their PhD; the Best PhD Dissertation Award Chairs (Mieke Jans and Artem Polyvyanyy), for giving the stage to the best theses delivered by those brilliant minds at the end of their PhD path; the Publicity Chairs (Francesca Zerbato and Simone Agostinelli) for making all the initiatives, calls, and key facts of our conference resonate along a plethora of communication channels; and clearly the authors, the keynote speakers, the panelists and the invited speakers, who took the time to carefully portray, document and present their most recent findings and thought-provoking observations at ICPM. A special mention goes to the ingenuous, energetic, determined Industry Track Team (Laura Marcus, Franziska Decher, Anaís García González, and Wolfgang Kratsch, headed by the Industry Chairs, Max Röglinger and Julian Lebherz) and their hive of innovative ideas, as they played a key role in reinventing a format at the core of our conference.

Speaking of thanks to give, the lyrics of an old song in Roman dialect read: "Roma nun fa' la stupida stasera; damme na mano…" [Rome, do not be foolish tonight; give me a hand…]. We must admit that the Eternal City largely helped us on that week. To some extent, we feel grateful to Rome as if Rome were an old friend (very old, with all due respect) to count on whenever you wish to leave your guests in awe with a story. We got the chance to reserve some favourable spots, thus providing a glance at the local arts, landscapes and history, which left a few of our friends and colleagues unimpressed (locals included!), we are proud to say. Our meeting and convention planner team of Consulta Umbria helped us immensely to achieve this (and more) goals! Our sincere words of gratitude go to our local crew, who almost literally bore the weight of the organisation (also moving displays, chairs and tables around, if need be): Wholehearted thanks to you, Angelo, Cecilia, Dario, Davide, Edo, Flavia, Francesca, Giacomo, Jacopo, Jerin, Luca, Matteo, Mattia, Saba, and Valerio!

And thank you all, process mining community! This was an unforgettable experience for us, and we hope you enjoyed it too. Looking forward to seeing you all in Copenhagen!

Ciao e a presto!

Andrea and Claudio