Postcard from Modena: in search of Enzo Ferrari
A new movie is set to draw visitors to the legendary sportscar maker’s home city
Da Antonio is a barbershop in the elegant city centre of Modena, northern Italy, and as I peer through its window on a sunny afternoon, I notice two things. The first, impossible to miss, is a large black-and-white photograph on the wall of a barber giving a haircut to the establishment’s most famous regular client, the legendary Enzo Ferrari. The second is that the shop is empty, and I seize the chance to get an impromptu haircut, and to talk sports cars.
I am tended by Alessandro D’Elia, whose father Massimo and great-uncle Antonio were Ferrari’s regular barbers in the later years of his life, until his death in 1988 at the age of 90. The man who founded the world’s most prestigious sporting car brand would pop in every morning for espresso, gossip and a shave, apart from Sundays and Mondays, when the barbers would visit him at his home. The routine, D’Elia tells me, was unbreakable.
Apart from the picture on the wall, a few toy cars and a small wooden box lying on a counter stuffed with minor memorabilia, there are no other homages to the motoring world’s Commendatore. D’Elia tells me that there used to be many more photographs in the years immediately following his death, but the barber’s family decided it was “too much”, and dialled down the cultish flourishes.
He does pull out a small colour photograph of himself, aged four, with the great man. Ferrari was restrained in most of his dealings, “molto serio”, D’Elia admits. “But nobody talks about the toy cars he always carried in the boot of his car, which he would hand out to children who recognised him. He was very different in private to his public persona.”
Modena will doubtless be bracing itself for a fresh wave of touristic interest following the release this Christmas of Michael Mann’s Ferrari, a smartly cast (Adam Driver, Penélope Cruz) and typically stylish recounting of a crucial period in Ferrari’s middle years, when the travails of both his personal and professional lives were threatening to overwhelm him.
He got over it. But the film refuses to pander to triumphalist clichés, dealing instead with Ferrari’s internal agonising as he negotiates those turbulent years. The loss of his son Dino, and his own dual life, split between his wife and his lover, make death and deceit the principal themes of the movie, sporting success merely its vibrant undertow.
Modena is suitably respectful of its most famous son’s guarded nature. There is no grandstanding in the streets he walked every day, little fanfare to celebrate his achievements. The house where he lived, on the busy Largo Garibaldi, is unassuming and unmarked. There are only small touches: look skywards, at the top of a flagpole in the middle of the avenue nearby, and there are three flags clustered together — those of Italy, the European Union, and the yellow-and-black colours of Ferrari.
The city centre’s streets are tranquil and pretty, worlds away from the growling universe depicted in Mann’s movie. You have to look carefully for notes of discord: there are one or two on Wiligelmo’s masterful relief sculptures above the entrance to the 12th-century cathedral, including Adam and Eve clutching their fig leaves while taking the serpent’s apple.
There is more temptation across the square at the Giusti boutique, where you can spend up to €595 on a bottle of the brand’s famous balsamic vinegar, which has been aged in casks from the early 18th century. These are the timelines that set the rhythm of this city, not the hundredths of a second that so preoccupied the motoring legends who have passed through its uncluttered streets.
It is at the Enzo Ferrari Museum, a short walk from the centre, that some of these apparent paradoxes begin to make sense. Unlike its better-known and flashier twin institution at Maranello, Ferrari’s factory 14km south of the city, there is a feeling here of almost scholarly intimacy, in the display of beautifully and precisely assembled engines housed in Ferrari’s original terracotta home, and the classic cars of the 1950s and 1960s reposing sumptuously in the sweeping modern annexe.
Enzo Ferrari was a craftsman, able to put together a locally sourced team of fellow specialists who would transform their world. It was his good fortune, perhaps peppered with a little regret, that he and his marque came of age at a time when other commercial phenomena — self-promotion, global marketing, the cult of celebrity — began their glamorous ascendancy. It was a cultural sweet spot, when the mechanics mingled with the movie stars, for which we may understandably feel nostalgic.
But Alessandro D’Elia also remembers the forbidding nature of the man at the centre of it all. “When I was little, one day everyone in the shop was joking about swear words, and he asked me to say one of them,” he recalls. “I couldn’t do it! He kept insisting, but I just couldn’t do it, even one word. That was the power of the man.”