Modena, Mo' Problems

About 4 years ago I picked up a book called “Heat” from the library. I originally thought I was reading the book version of the 1995 action movie staring Pacino and DeNiro. Instead it was a nonfiction book about Bill Buford’s quest to become a kitchen slave to Mario Batali and, eventually, to learn from master butcher, Dario Cecchini in the small Italian town of Panzano.

There were few high-octane shootouts, but I loved Buford's encounters with Dario, the Dante-quoting butcher who screams at offending customers, bites a raw piece of meat when a tourist asks if the cut he just bought was good, and generally seems like a knife-wielding badass.

I wanted to meet this butcher.

While planning this trip to Italy, I figured this was the closest I’d yet been to Panzano, so I might as well stop by Dario’s butcher shop, hear some Dante and get yelled at. And so, I look up Panzano, find it on the map 10 km away from the balsamic-producing city of Modena (pronounced MOH-dena, if you want to say it correctly and sound like a world-traveling jerk) and plan for a two-day stay at the luxurious, yet oddly cheap, Real Fini Baia del Re. (Editor's Note: Foreshadowing!)

Skip ahead to Wednesday, August 11th when we arrive in Modena. First, the trip from Siena^[*]took 6 hours, because in Italy you have the choice of paying for trains in time or money, and we had way more time. The trip, if we had been flush with Euros, would’ve been 2 hours. Because we were still poor and, moreover, I am still cheap, from the train station, we took a bus, got off, waited awhile, took another bus, and got off at the end of the bus line.

This was not, however, the location of the luxurious Real Fini. We were at 1200 Strada Vignolese and we needed to be at 1686. Easy, right? That’s like 4 blocks in America. Even with 130 pounds of luggage it should be 5 minutes, tops. Important details soon emerged, however to complicate the matter:

1. There was no sidewalk, and only a little shoulder.
2. We were walking alongside a busy highway.
3. We frequently had to swerve our wheelie duffles to the side to avoid road kill pancakes of avian and unidentifiable varieties.
4. After dragging our bags through the gravel for 15 sweaty minutes the numbers are onlyat 1426.
5. I had surely led us to our deaths in order to save cab fare.

When we were close to giving up (and setting up camp? We didn’t really have a plan B), I had the brilliant idea asking inside a nearby restaurant how far it was. The owner, a tiny woman with the 50 year-old’s version of a pixie cut answered in beautifully lilted English, “only 200 meters.” I told her we were walking, and asked if we should take a cab, but she said “no, not so dangerous.”

I returned to Sarah triumphant. Only 200 more meters! All we had to do was cross over this bridge that went over the freeway and we’d be there!

To make a long story short, we trudged on for another hot 20 minutes before we made it to the concierge desk of the Real Fini. (The first line of their promotion brochure said “located halfway between luxury and convenience,” which we realized too late, meant it was actually in neither.)

“How did you arrive?” they asked.
“We walked.”
“Oh, that’s dangerous,” they said, frowning.
“Yeah,” I said. “I wouldn’t recommend it."

But our room made it all worthwhile. Hardwood floors. A bathroom that could eat the bathrooms of our two previous hotels and be hungry for more. HDTV. And get this, the minibar was included. Can you imagine the transformative experience when a minibar, once the embodiment of everything overpriced and evil about traveling, becomes free? And gets restocked when housekeeping comes? I started chugging the free bubbly water at bedtime just so there’d be another one in the minibar the next day.

Now that I was no longer in peril, had showered with the free, minty shower gel, and shared a complimentary blood orange juice with Sarah, I was ready to plan tomorrow when I finally get to see Dario the insane and charismatic butcher. I’d ask for a photo, he’d yell at me and then chase me out of the shop with a boning knife and a cleaver saying:

Io vidi un, fatto a guisa di leuto,

pur ch'elli avesse avuta l'anguinaia

tronca da l'altro che l'uomo ha forcuto. (Canto XXX, Lines 49-51)

I couldn’t wait.

First the good news: Panzano was only 11 km away from our hotel. This must’ve been why I’d chosen the place. Hooray me! Also, it seemed possible to rent an economy car, or even a moto for 35 Euro a day. Totally reasonable.

Then the bad news: There were two Panzanos in Italy, and Dario, for some reason, chose to live in the other one, Pazano-in-Chianti. The worse news: the right Panzano, with meat and yelling, was 168km away. The really annoying news: we had passed by the right Panzano in the first 2 hours of our train ride.

So that whole thing turned out to be less than ideal. It took a total of 9 hours to get to our ridiculously located hotel next to the entirely wrong town.

But there turned out to be a ton of pluses. The hotel had a delicious café and restaurant, each of which we dined at that evening. Sarah discovered gnocco frito, which is a piece of meat stuck between two small hot slices of puff pastry, while I partially destroyed some insanely tender spinach-ricotta torteloni (and finished destroying it the next day).

We’d also finally lost the tourists. Almost everyone in Modena was local, and even a fair number of the usual inhabitants were missing, since August is basically a vacation month. As a result, we got the city to ourselves and everyone was super nice. Even the taxi driver apologized for the fare being expensive.

So yeah, turns out the trick is to pick a place that you want to go, then go to a town near a town that sounds like where you want to be. May our future travels be equally random and ridiculous.

PS The right Panzano is pretty close to Florence, which we’ll be hitting up at the end of the trip. Barring another hilariously unlikely mixup, I’ll probably get a chance to see Dario cut up some meat in less than 2 weeks.

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^[*]A few notes on Siena since it was awesome, but I don’t want to fall behind on blogging. It’s a walled medieval city designed as a labyrinth, as Sarah noted, “to confuse invading barbarians.” Because of a 3-minute horse race that was happening in a week, the town was flooded with very confused, wandering barbarians. On the plus side, it was a delightful place to get lost in, with gelaterias as plentiful as Starbucks. On the second day, my old college friend Laurel took a break from her intensive language course to show Sarah and me around, introducing us to the fluorescently alluring compari soda, rosemary and lavender gelato, and the best all-you-can-eat snack buffet that comes free with purchase of a 5 Euro beer. She also kept us from getting lost for a whole day, which was an equally disorienting, though extremely pleasant experience.