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Jessica considered the proposal. “Haven’t we just been to Italy?” she asked.

“Well, yes, it’s true, a good point. We have just been to Italy.”

“And didn’t you learn how to make tortellini?”

“Well, yes, that’s true, too.” But tortellini was only one dish, and I’d become convinced that there were culinary secrets—an attitude, a touch, the thing that Mario was always saying that you can learn only “over there”—that I needed to discover. That was why we had to go back.

Jessica took this in. (It was a testing moment in the marriage.) “And who exactly is going to tell you these secrets?”

So I told her about Dario Cecchini: he, I’d become convinced, was the person I should work for. He didn’t know me, and I had no idea if he’d take me on. But there were already so many connections between us: he had to take me on! When Mario’s father, Armandino Batali, quit his job at Boeing and decided to learn how Italians prepared meat, he went first to Dario’s butcher shop for instruction. I phoned Armandino and asked him why. Because Dario was the most highly regarded butcher in Italy, he said, and because his shop wasn’t simply a butcher shop but a museum of Tuscan cooking: raw and cooked meat, cuts of Chianti beef along with ragùs and sauces and cured porks—a university of the zona.

I also knew about Dario from Elisa. In the summers she conducted a weeklong cooking class nearby and visited Dario’s for inspiration. (She kept a picture of him by her station in the Babbo kitchen.)

And the food writer Faith Willinger had discovered fennel pollen at Dario’s, the stuff she secreted into her luggage and smuggled across the Atlantic, which was then sprinkled atop Mario’s tortelloni. On one of Willinger’s trips to the United States—the twenty-fifth anniversary party of Chez Panisse—she’d also brought the butcher with her, a visit that had been reported in the
International Herald Tribune,
which, coincidentally, I had torn out and saved: it described Cecchini as the most famous butcher in the world.

I phoned. Signore Cecchini, I said, I am a friend of Mario Batali.

“Accidenti!”
he declared (which seems to mean something like “Well, I’ll be damned!” but what did I know?).

Mario, as you know, is the son of Armandino, I said, reading from a piece of prepared text. (Italian telephones scared the jeebers out of me—I’d been rehearsing my questions all morning long.)

“Accidenti!”

He is also a friend of Faith Willinger.

“Accidenti!”

And I would like to learn how to be a Tuscan butcher.

“Accidenti! Vieni! Pronto! Ora!”
—Come! Quickly! Now!

Then Dario passed the phone to a woman who introduced herself as his wife, Ann Marie, and who, thankfully, was an American and able to confirm my understanding of the exchange I’d just had. One week later, there I was, on a Sunday, crossing the busy Chiantigiana, the hill highway that runs the length of Chianti, from Florence to Siena, and cuts through the middle of Panzano, and experiencing a feeling I’d had when I walked into the Babbo kitchen for the first time: that I would be a different person when my stay here was completed, but I had no idea how.

D
ARIO’S BUTCHER
shop, the
macelleria,
was on a steep street next to the post office. Actually, it was two shops joined together. The lower one was like a family sitting room (or, more precisely, the sitting room of a family that lives with its animals). There were a dining table with chairs, a bookcase, a bust of Dante, and a ceramic fountain (the kind cows drink water from). There were also a menacing set of black spikes (entitled “Welcome to Tuscany”) and a papier-mâché depiction of something—of people, I’d discover, life-size, disappearing into the flames of Hell. The upper shop, where the wares were displayed, was impossible to get into. There was a crush of people: inside, in the doorway, on the sidewalk, spilling into the street. How many? A hundred? More? They were sweaty and excited. I stood on my tiptoes. Someone had a television camera on his shoulder. There were flashing bulbs. I could hear loud choral music of what I thought might be Mozart’s “Requiem.” (Why a requiem? Then again, it’s a butcher’s shop: why not a requiem?)

I pushed my way in. Everyone seemed to be holding a glass of red wine in one hand and feeding themselves gobs of a frothy white cream with the other.

“Lardo,”
a man said, offering me some.
Lardo crudo.
Raw, not cured. It was spread across his cheeks like toothpaste.

I pressed forward. A man in a suit was swinging a
fiasco
of red wine—straw-covered, like one of those bottles you see in really bad restaurants and learn never to drink. He tried to pour me a glass but missed, and the wine landed on my shoes. It wasn’t eleven o’clock in the morning, but an energetic raucous tipsiness was everywhere: you smelled it, it elbowed you, it laughed harshly in your face. Behind a glass display of meats, salumi, and sausages was the butcher, standing on a platform, towering above the room, oblivious to the people below him, who were clamoring and giving him things: orders, money, paper for an autograph. He ignored them. He, too, was drinking wine—quite a lot, it seemed. He had a happy half grin. The music was very loud—
” Dies irae, dies illa!”
(“Days of wrath, days of doom!”)—and people were shouting to be heard. In one hand, the butcher held a shiny serrated knife, more military saber than butcher’s tool. He was tall, over six feet. At the time I thought he must be six and a half feet, but that was the effect of the platform, which made him seem comic-book tall, like a cartoon caveman. (
“Solvet saeclum in favilla!”
“The world in ashes!”) His hands were gigantic. They might have been the largest hands I’d seen in my life. They were way out of proportion with the rest of his body. They looked as if they might be half the length of his arms. The fingers were comparably long, like limbs. He was wearing pink clogs and socks, a pink bandanna round his throat, and a pink cotton shirt—taut, almost ill fitting over the shoulders, which were large and overdeveloped, giving him a hunchbacked appearance. His hair was cropped, closely cut to the side of the head, crew-cut style, and he had big eyebrows, a big nose, big lips. A face of big features. He was in his late forties, my age.

I thought: So this is Dario Cecchini, and he spotted me spotting him. He turned off the music and commanded silence. The place went quiet.
“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,”
he boomed,
“mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.”
Even I recognized that this was the beginning of Dante’s
Inferno.
“Midway through the road of life, I found myself in a dark wood, on a lost road.” Midway through my life, indeed. Is that where I was? Lost, on the road to Hell?

It started to rain, and more people crushed inside, pushing hard, to get out of the wet. Dario continued. Or maybe he’d embarked on something new. Whatever it was, it was being said with great gusto. His eyes were veined and red, and his pupils were dilated. I could observe them because he’d jumped off the platform, seized me by the shoulders, and, inches from my face, was spraying me with a saliva-foamy verse. He seemed to be declaiming rhyming couplets, very singsongy. One was shouted; the next was whispered. He crouched low, as though trying to take his audience by surprise. Then he thrust himself upright, as though making an announcement. He made his eyes big; he made them small. He wagged his finger; he brought his hands together in prayer. I’ve never seen such a melodramatic reading. (Someone was now playing a fiddle.) It called for gaslights and Victorian top hats: this was what Dickens must have sounded like. Frankly, it seemed ridiculous. But the room loved it, and when Dario stopped and bounced back to his platform, the audience, in a high metabolic euphoria (the drink, the raw fat, the hot, closed space, the privilege of being in it) erupted in uproarious vaudeville applause, which Dario acknowledged, waving a hand in the air. He jettisoned the Mozart CD, turned up the volume, and popped in a salsa-sounding Italian number.

“Festa!”
he shouted, gyrating to the end of the podium.
“Festa! Festa! Festa!”
He spun and came back in the other direction.
“Festa! Festa! Festa! Festa!”

I was to report to work the next morning at eight.

20

O
N A
M
ONDAY MORNING,
Panzano was different. On Sunday, the place had the energy of its visitors and probably some of the romance they’d wanted to find there. On Monday, it was an out-of-the-way village, quiet and rather ugly.

There were nine hundred people. They were served, I would learn, by two butchers, two cafés, two bars, four family-run food stores or
alimentari,
two restaurants, two hotels, and (uncharacteristically) three bakers. I would also discover that, with the town’s offerings so precisely divided, the task of buying, say, a loaf of bread or a coffee was believed to reveal things about your character, probably your politics, and—who knows?—maybe your attitude to the afterlife. Wine was an entirely different category, because there were not two winemakers but eighteen, and ordering a glass at a bar could be a delicate social feat. There were also, fittingly, two towns: ancient and new.

The ancient town was a maze of old and imitation old: remnants of a castle (the archways), a medieval wall, a twelfth-century church rebuilt in the twentieth century (both it and the castle had been destroyed just about every hundred years since the 1100s), bad sewage, noisy neighbors, and no privacy. It was a characteristic feudal fortification constructed on the top of a hill during the long wars between the Sienese and the Florentines, both defense and shelter for the people who worked the land. You could see that land, looking more or less as it has at any other time in Panzano’s history, spreading out in a series of basin-like valleys: more giant bathtubs than conventional river-carved ravines. The view was pretty and tranquil-making. I was surprised by how much was still wooded and wild. What was cultivated was mainly grapevines: their proliferation represented the only significant change in the landscape in the last five hundred years. It was the beginning of April, and the vineyards were long lines of plowed dark earth, a mathematical map of gnarly black stumps with tight fists of tiny green leaves that would open any day now, like a hand.

The new part of town was made of stucco walls with few adornments: a postwar efficiency. Like many hill towns, Panzano had been occupied by the Nazis, who had set the buildings near the main road alight when they retreated. The conflagration destroyed structures that had been standing for centuries, including the Antica Macelleria Cecchini, which had been in the same spot, run by the firstborn male of the Cecchini family, for eight generations. Upstairs, in an abandoned floor above the macelleria, I got a sense of what the old building had been like: the stone walls and floors are still intact, the very place where Dario’s grandfather, the man Dario was named after, housed twenty-two members of his family, protecting them in adversity. During the war, he sold meat to the partisans, who crept up the hill before dawn; two hours later, promptly at eight, the Fascists appeared. In Chianti, I would discover soon enough, no one goes without meat.

This morning, the macelleria was in a frenzy. It was a “production day.” I would learn this later; at the time, I understood only that I was always having to get out of the way of people moving very quickly. In the back, there was a small kitchen—an oven, a marble counter, and a butcher’s block, where an older man worked. He was referred to as Il Maestro, “the master,” and treated with unrelenting respect. All exchanges ended with this title. It was: How are you today, Maestro?

Would you like a coffee, Maestro?

May I remove these scraps, Maestro?

Around eleven, the Maestro had something to eat, which was bread (the “Maestro’s loaf,” cooked in a wood-burning oven and purchased by someone on their way to work) with olive oil and sprinkled with salt.

May I prepare it for you, Maestro?

Are you finished, Maestro?

May I remove the plate, Maestro?

Only two people were allowed to use a knife: Dario and the Maestro. Dario wielded his in the front, in view of visitors. The Maestro, in the back, kept his in a drawer underneath the butcher’s block. The Maestro was sixty-two, dressed in his own white smock (everyone else was in the butcher uniform—a medieval floor-length “Antica Macelleria Cecchini” apron). He lived in the next valley, near his son Enrico, who owned a thousand olive trees and made a fragrant, intense oil, very hard to come by, mainly because Dario bought most of it. The Maestro had silver hair, a thin, expressively lined face, black eyebrows, big ears, and a large masculine nose. “Look at that face,” a friend of the Maestro’s instructed me some time later, when I’d become comfortable enough in Italian to follow some of the back-and-forth banter of the place. “Isn’t that the face of an Etruscan? Don’t you recognize it from the tomb paintings? It’s as old as these hills.” The Maestro was deliberate (in that ancient masculine way) and understated (in that ancient masculine way), and spoke with what sometimes seemed like an exaggerated gravitas, gathering his long fingers together like a piece of punctuation. The fingers were enormous. Astonishingly, the Maestro’s hands were bigger than Dario’s. His hands were so big they made me uneasy. (Why were mine so small? I often asked myself at the end of a long day, staring at them on my walk home. I now realize that they aren’t that small. In the normal world, they might be called large. The last time I needed a pair of gloves, that’s what I bought: large ones. Even so, the whole time I was at the butcher shop, I would re-examine my hands from time to time: they were so pudgy, the fingers so runty, the whole package so inadequate. Maybe that’s what you need to do this job: gigantic hands. If you don’t have forest animals growing at the end of your forearms, take up pastry.)