A Season For All Things Bright, Beautiful and Red

Every year around this time I would ask my dad what he wanted for Christmas, and every year his answer was the same. “You can just park it on the corner”, he’d say. “A Ferrari?” I’d ask. “Yep. I’ll take it from there”.

Once I asked him what color he wanted. It was like asking an Italian politician what color tie to wear. In my dad’s world, ties were blue. Ferraris were red. There was no discussion to be had.

Sadly, there was also no Ferrari. I think the closest he got was a hat from the Ferrari merchandise shop in the Rome airport.

That was also probably the closest I’d been to a Ferrari until my recent visit to Modena.

Known primarily for its place at the center of Emilia-Romagna food culture, Modena is home to Massimo Bottura’s three Michelin-starred restaurant Osteria Francescana, ground zero for the best balsamic vinegar in the world, and neighbor to Parma, designated originators of the finest prosciutto and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. (Coincidently, it was also the home of Luciano Pavarotti, who was known to approach a plate of pasta and a Puccini aria with equal gusto.)

So I was thinking of nothing but comfort food and cover when I ducked out of a pounding rainstorm into the Antica Trattoria Ponte Guerro, a restaurant just off the highway in the countryside that surrounds the city. As its name implies, the trattoria was firmly in keeping with the classic tradition: checkered tablecloths, walls decorated with rustic farm tools and a TV screen the size of a Caravaggio.  The menu included seven different variations of tortellini. It seemed pretty obvious to order the pasta.

It wasn’t until the waitress retreated to the kitchen that I noticed—the only females in this restaurant were either working there or three years old and sitting in their father’s lap. The room was filled exclusively with men, and men of a very particular breed. These were men with machines on their mind.

The guy sitting next to me watched a motocross race on his phone through the entire dinner. His dining companion was reading what appeared to be a tire catalog. There was a table of people with Formula One logos on their jackets; there were truck drivers and mechanics and a motley middle-aged motorcycle gang.

It turns out that Parmigiano is not the only thing on wheels in Modena. In fact, Modena lies in the heart of what is known as Motor Valley,  Italy’s version of Detroit, and home turf to an array of the country’s flashiest automobile and motorcycle brands: Lamborghini, Ducati, Pagani, Maserati, and yes, Ferrari.

In some ways, Emilia-Romagna is an odd place to find some of the most stylish cars and bikes in the world. Whenever I pass through the region on my way to Milan, the first thing to strike me is the undeniable scent of manure. There you are  in one of the most prosperous industrial sections of the country,  and everything smells of barnyard animals.

In fact, the Po Valley, which stretches from Modena to Torino, is not only a manufacturing center, but also Italy’s most productive agricultural region. Cars are cool, but farming is a big business there, and outside of the city centers of Modena, Parma, and even Bologna, the surrounding area is predominately rural, more Nebraska than Detroit. On my way to visit the Enzo Ferrari museum the day after my dinner with the motor men, I stopped off at a farm stand on the side of the road and bought a bag of the best clementines outside of Sicily.

The Museo Casa Enzo Ferrari is built on the site of the founder’s boyhood home, where his father Alfredo had a metal workshop in the early 1900’s and  Enzo began tinkering with engines as a teenager, before launching his early career as a racing driver.  On a sweeping concrete wall leading to the museum, the fateful words are inscribed: “This house was sold by Enzo Ferrari when he was 20 years old, in order to buy his first race car. The beginning of the Legend”.

Even from the parking lot, the juxtapositions are striking. The museum itself is an Italian Futurist poster come to life, all curves and color, a sleek glass body with a bright yellow roof that feels as if it’s in constant motion. Next to it is the stolid 19th century brick building, Officina Meccanica Alfredo Ferrari, where Enzo grew up. Behind it, you can see the Modena train station and surrounding industrial sprawl,  and a lone, left-over medieval turret rising up out of the gray apartment buildings, a tree growing out of the cracks in it’s ancient stonework.

Here then is the miracle of post-war Italy: a war-torn country with little beyond a treasure chest of antiquities and a largely agrarian economy not only industrializes, but redefines itself over the course of two decades as an international capitol of style and innovative design. It’s a transformation embodied in the story of Enzo Ferrari, who beneath an prodigious pompadour (when he was a young race car driver) or behind his ubiquitous sunglasses (when he was known as Il Grande Vecchio) built one of the nation’s most iconic brands.

Inside the pavilion of the museum, that story is laid out in all of its high gloss and sparkling chrome, a dazzling display of cars made both for the racing track and the open road, from Ferrari’s first race cars in the late 1940s up to the current moment.  There’s also a video presentation, that if not terribly informative, is revealing for what it doesn’t say.

There’s little mention in the narration of the challenges that must have existed in building a new factory in nearby Maranello, after the original was destroyed by Allied bombs in WWII. Likewise, not much is said of the financial problems in the early Sixties that led the Commander (as the Italian press dubbed Enzo) to the brink of selling to Ford, an episode at the center of the soon to be released “Ferrari” film, starring Adam Driver.

One can surmise that the image-obsessed, ruthlessly competitive Enzo preferred not to do a full reveal, or to acknowledge that his ascent was less a straight and steady climb than a breakneck series of daredevil turns. His generation was one for showing off the trophies, but rarely the struggle behind them.

Enzo Ferrari (Il Grande Vecchio, The Commander)

It’s easy to cast elite products like Ferrari as symbols of excess and indulgence. But if they often represent the worst sides of our nature, sometimes they also show us the best. Behind those bright red, shiny objects is the innate human desire to create something not just functional, but thrilling.

You see that excitement in the faces of the children visiting the museum, inspecting cars built long before their lives began in a soaring space that might otherwise be a farmer’s field across from the local train station. Sometimes out of a hard, humble place, something bold and brash and beautiful is born. Young or old, our sense of wonder is sparked by the sheer force of imagination and invention.

Every holiday season, our New York church sponsors a Toy Drive to buy gifts for children that might otherwise not receive one. This year, we drew a five-year old boy named Michael, who apparently likes “Spiderman and toy cars”.

I’m thinking to get him a Ferrari. At least I know my dad would approve.