Tuscany? Try the fast cars and slow feasts next door
Sebastian O’Kelly is wowed by supercars, sumptuous dishes and even Lambrusco on a trip to Emilia Romagna
FOR years, neighbouring provinces have looked on enviously at Tuscany luring in a golden flow of middle-class tourists and wondered: why not us, too? In fairness, Emilia Romagna, just over the Apennines to the north, has fewer grounds for jealousy than most.
After all, the province – the Emilia bit of it from a Roman consul who has given his name to every girl called Emily – has more than its fair share of beautiful cities. Parma, Modena and Bologna have for years topped numerous polls pondering quality of life in Italy.
The region has plentiful employment in light industrial businesses, and that minority of countryside that isn’t as flat as a plate is very pretty and almost… well, Tuscan.
Emilia Romagna’s food products – parmesan cheese, Parma ham, tortellini, balsamic vinegar – are famous throughout the world, and have been for years. An anxious Samuel Pepys buried his wheel of parmesan in the garden to save it from the Great Fire of London.
Emilia Romagna even has a bucket-and-spade mass tourism money-earner around Rimini on the Adriatic coast.
But 20 years of a flat-lining Italian economy are taking their toll, and a trickle of that touristic gold pouring into every corner of Tuscany would be very welcome.
The province’s marketing alchemists think they have come up with something that will do the trick: welcome to Emilia Romagna, home of fast cars and slow food.
Assembled in little ateliers rather than factories – and all accessible – are the sort of automotive riches that will make any petrolhead blow a gasket.
Modena, a beautiful little town about the size of Guildford in Surrey, has Ferrari, Maserati and Pagani. Lamborghini and Ducati are 25 miles away in Bologna, and Dallara is just outside Parma in the other direction.
These are points of pilgrimage for carlovers, even when they cannot quite stretch to £2 million for a Pagani Zonda, or £200,000 for a Maserati.
IN TOTAL, there are 15 motor museums, and the intrepid can even have a go on the race track of Italy’s own – no sniggering at the back – International School of Safe Driving, just outside Parma. In my case, this involved the terrifying experience of being hurled around hairpins and chicanes at 110mph in a £60,000 Alfa Romeo Stelvio Quadrifoglio, described as an Italian take on the SUV.
After doing what a Chelsea tractor most certainly shouldn’t, it was a relief that the next couple of laps were in a proper sports car – Alfa Romeo’s 4C Spider – which stuck to the road like wet spaghetti.
‘So, what do you drive?’ asked the driver, Lorenzo, smilingly as we squealed to a stop.
‘A 20-year-old Volvo 940 estate,’ I replied. The smile flickered slightly, but Lorenzo’s attention had moved on at slightly faster than 110mph.
It is a curious form of tourism to champion the motor car as the world wearies of the gasguzzling type and considers less polluting alternatives. But Emilia Romagna already lures in 1.8 million people for the boutique auto museums and events, and they spend about £ 300 million a year. It relishes the prospect of more. All of which must be very comforting to the 66,000 employees whose livelihood depends on this industry.
May s aw t he l aunch of t he region’s Motor Valley Fest, coinciding with the arrival at Modena
of the vintage car Mille Miglia (1,000 miles) race.
There was a black-tie dinner at the ducal palace from the ‘world’s best chef ’, Massimo Bottura, a Michelin three- star campaigner against food waste; opera in the Luciano Pavarotti Theatre; gleaming cars in all the piazzas; and then an ear-splitting roar on a Saturday morning as the Mille Miglia tore through the medieval streets.
Yet even the most uninterested in motor cars – that would be me – cannot visit the Ferrari museum in Modena without appreciating the astonishing beauty of the models from the 1950s and 1960s. They are displayed as works of art, and quite possibly they are.
Slow food is the other lure of the region, and this year’s challenge for Emilia Romagna is to make the local frothy red Lambrusco popular again. No 1970s party in Britain was complete without some guest bringing along a cheapish bottle and parking it beside the Blue Nun before then choosing a glass of something else.
But Lambrusco is ripe for reassessment, as it is a seriously wellmade product for those who find supermarket prosecco a bit thin.
A curiosity of Lambrusco is that once pressed, it is chill- stored, and later fermented throughout the
year according to demand. This keeps the wine, which is only 11 per cent alcohol, young and fresh.
‘You think it is rubbish, no?’ was the oddly defensive query from the wife of the owner of the hist oric Cleto Chiarli winery in Modena (www.chiarli.it).
Certainly not. I even bought a couple of bottles, at £8 each, as a rarefied, novelty aperitif.
Just when Lambrusco went flat in the 1980s, Modena began to have better luck with its unlikely, yet most interesting, food product: balsamic vinegar. For a start, it is not really a vinegar, which is a fermented product left to acetify.
Balsamic vinegar is grape must, first boiled to a reduction and then left to mature in a sequence of open barrels of diminishing size.
The smallest and last barrel has the nectar which requires at least 12 years of maturation.
One enthusiast is Pierce Brosnan, who has bought a series of six barrels at the Villa San Donnino ‘ vinegary’, or acetaio ( villasan donnino.it). His biggest barrel is dated only 2017, so the star will have to wait until 2023 to get something half-decent, and 2029 before it will qualify as the real thing.
Balsamic vinegar is a wretchedly prosaic name for what was originally a medicine prescribed in less scientific times for everything from plague to toothache. This explains the word balm. It is an extraordinarily rich condiment. Locals are as happy to put it on steak as they are on ice cream, which sounds ludicrous, but is actually delicious. Expect to pay about £40 for 100ml bottle.
As for the stuff in supermarkets, that is ordinary wine vinegar and caramelised sugar, and it gives only the most watery hint of the flavours the real thing can yield.
For a more relaxed, less crowded version of Tuscany, Emilia Romagna deserves a shot.
You don’t need to be that interested in the fast cars, but it would be a surprise if none of the slow foods hit the spot.