Never Trust a Thin Cook and Other Lessons from Italy’s Culinary Capital

La Ferrari

La Ferrari It’s Sunday morning, and the sound of mosquitoes flying everywhere wakes me up at 5 a.m. The scary little plugin insecticide device won’t get rid of the bugs this time. Then I realize the buzzing emanates from Maurizio’s bar below us, where the regulars are watching the Formula One race, live from Malaysia. I consider asking him to turn down the TV, but then I hear the noise coming from nearly every one of my neighbors’ windows. Modena is the land of automobiles: Maserati, Lamborghini , De Tomaso, Bugatti, Stanguellini, Cizeta, but most of all Ferrari. Enzo Ferrari built his first factory in town and then moved it nearby to Maranello. Modena claims Ferrari as its own, and every Formula One race calls for an unofficial holiday because what else could possibly be more important? The Ferrari logo is pasted everywhere. Even a computer mouse in the tourist office is colored Ferrari red and has race car driver Michael Schumacher’s signature imprinted on it. While in the United States every classroom has the Stars and Stripes hanging in the corner, Modena’s have Ferrari posters. The high school students I teach ask if I root for Ferrari, and I have little choice but to say “yes.” This puts me in their good graces; otherwise, why would they pay attention 196 to a traitor? To prove my supposed interest, I tell them about a video I saw of a Ferrari driving full speed at dawn from one end of Paris to the other in twenty minutes with pedestrians diving out of the way. For once, my students are speechless in amazement. One of them lifts his jaw and exclaims , “Bellissimo! Very beautiful! This my dream!” Italian law is very wise to forbid teenagers to get their driver’s license until eighteen years of age. My students ask how powerful my car’s engine is back home, and I feel like a fool when I have no idea. “At least you know the maximum speed of your automobile, no?” I explain that U.S. speed limits don’t allow us to reach the car’s top speed. They don’t quite understand, and soon the class breaks into chaos as some students insist Italy has speed limits too. The naysayers point out, “No one is ever ticketed, so essentially there is no law, right?” The word safe doesn’t really exist in Italian. Sicuro is just “secure.” My students suggest non pericoloso (not dangerous) but add that everything has a certain amount of danger, so “safe” is a paradox. Later, one of my adult students who works at the Ferrari factory asks me to clarify American product liability laws that just allowed Porsche to be sued for making a car that accelerates too fast. “How is that possible? Troppo veloce? How can a car be too fast?” As the futurist F. T. Marinetti wrote, “speed is beauty,” so how can something be too beautiful? Ferrari’s Formula One zooms from zero to one hundred miles per hour and back to zero in seconds. I ask one of my students if these cars are dangerous. He works for one of the many high-tech cottage industries that construct parts for Ferrari’s race cars. He scoffs. “Soccer is responsible for many more injuries,” he assures me. “In these last twenty years of La Ferrari 197 Formula One, only five people have died, and they’ve usually been spectators.” Katy suddenly shows an interest in going to San Marino to see the next Grand Prix, but I tell her I’d get the same satisfaction lying by the side of the autostrada watching traffic. One student promises us that seeing a Formula One race would be very memorable because the cars are the loudest thing he’s ever heard. “It’s very beautiful, but bring earplugs or you won’t be able to hear for a couple of days.” With this encouragement, I agree to go to San Marino with Katy only if she can sit through an entire race on TV beforehand. The weekend of a Formula One race arrives, and Japanese and German Ferrari fans appear in Modena’s piazza decked out head to foot in bright red Ferrari garb, in stark contrast to the somber, stylishly dark clothes of Italians. I ask my students who work at the Maserati factory what time the...