The next morning we headed down for a delicious buffet breakfast, which we ate to the sounds of Pavarotti on the stereo and F1 cars testing in the background - I’ve never seen George look so satisfied! We headed off to locate a self-service laundrette to wash the clothes from the first week - it was hard to believe that we had only been on honeymoon for eleven days with everything we had packed in!
Franco gave us clear directions to a laundrette in the next town, and we stuck on several washes, clearing our pockets of all the change we had been collecting during the past week. We had a funny encounter with a local woman who kept talking to us in Italian even though I kept telling her that I didn’t speak Italian, I only understood a few words.
She talked louder and louder and pointed at things until I understood. The curiosity grew as she watched George and myself roll up all our dry clothes to pack them back into the suitcase - why were we doing this? Using some quick sign language, I explained that I could fit more things into the case, and that they didn’t get creased this way. Satisfied with this explanation, she headed on her way, leaving us to finish off.
That evening we headed off with a tour guide to visit balsamic vinegar and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese factories. We learnt a lot about how the cheese and vinegar are produced and their history in the region. After tasting and buying some of the delicious mature parmesan, we headed off with our guide to the balsamic vinegar factory, which was a small two-storey building behind someone’s house.
They had been producing vinegar here for decades. In this family business, the traditional birthday gifts for ‘coming-of-age’ birthdays were replaced with gifts of a barrel of vinegar - something which would hold its value for years to come.
Leaving the cask aging room and its strong sweet smell behind, we participated in a tasting of the different ages of vinegar. We selected twenty-five year old vinegar and some special ‘juniper-aged’ vinegar as our choices to bring home a flavour of Italy.
To finish off our lovely evening our guide directed us up twisty, windy roads to the hillside village of Castelvetro di Modena just as the sun was getting low in the sky. In the middle ages this was a castle town at the cross-roads between the foothills and the road climbing up the Apennines.
The central square displays some charming Renaissance architecture and a giant checkerboard laid into the main square. Each September a game is played here, using living pieces as part of the town’s festival.
When we got back to the hotel we decided to take a quick wander before heading for dinner. As we left the hotel, George spotted a curious yellow car driving past, on its way back from the Fiorano test track and immediately grabbed the camera to squeeze off a few quick shots.
He then turned to me excitedly and said “Did you see that?â€?
“It was a yellow car” I replied, shrugging.
Not just any yellow car apparently, but an as-yet unreleased Ferrari that was just coming back from being tested. I think that it made his night!
