Pataccini first came to Latvia in 2010 thanks to a scholarship granted to him by the State Education Development Agency of Latvia. Pataccini returned to Latvia in 2013 to study the role of financial markets in the transition from the former centrally planned economies to market economies, with Latvia as an example. Pataccini considers Latvia as a very interesting place and believes that the Latvian people are similar to Argentinians; nevertheless, he finds some Latvian ways of socialising, such as picking wild mushrooms, very unusual.