First of all, it annoys me that I can’t put emojis in my titles. There…that’s off my chest.
And, I’m going to make a confession: we made two trips to Modena. That might be kind of obvious as the weather is rather different in the photos. The first trip was when we had the car for the food tour – we had just enough extra time to walk into the historic center and say, yeah we want to come back here! Last week we took the train there. So glad we did. What a pretty town!
Ferrari. My first car love. Okay, not truly my first…that would have been the car Richard Carpenter was driving on the cover of The Carpenters Then and Now album. The car that my 8 year old self insisted was a Pinto. My most profound apologies…seeing as he was driving a Jaguar XKE. I got better. It was somewhere between 1978 and 1980 (maybe coinciding with Magnum PI, but I’m not sure) that I first saw a 308 GTS. This is truly when my gearheadedness began. It was never so much the mechanics, much to my father’s disappointment, it was definitely more about style. Although I can still appreciate the mechanics! And, I will now apologize to all the car salesmen I managed to convince (in my late teens) that I could afford to buy the cars I test drove. And managed not to wreck or get tickets in. Many thanks to any guardian angels that have followed me and cleaned up the messes! Ah, fun times.
Anyhoo…as soon as we decided on Parma and I realized how close to Modena we would be, I made the request for a visit to the Ferrari Museum. I later realized that there are TWO museums each focusing on a different aspect of the brand.
Enzo Ferrari was from Modena. The museum there utilizes the house he grew up in – it was also the house he later sold in order to buy his first race car. Many, many years later he returned to Modena and repurchased the house.
I am actually trying not to post a thousand car photos. Because I do have a photos of nearly every car at both museums.
After taking our time at the Modena museum we took a walk over to the historic center of town. We didn’t have long there as we needed to go to Maranello. But I’ll get to that after a bit about Maranello.
It was quite foggy as we drove to Maranello so we weren’t able to see much. It appears to be an industrial city – not much to recommend it – other than a rather impressive driving track…and Ferraris are built here. A few blocks over from the factory is a very impressive building that I failed to get a photo of. The Ferrari Museum here is BIG. And so cool. Where Modena was more about Enzo and the history – Maranello is a celebration of beautiful cars. Did you know you can have a custom designed Ferrari? Like custom body and everything? Seriously. It costs several million dollars but I guess if you already have everything else…
If you find yourself in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy and beautiful cars are your thing I can’t recommend both museums enough. A grand time was had.
Okay, so Modena itself. I think it and Parma are similar in population but for some reason Modena felt larger. It does have one thing that Parma does not have and that is a permanent indoor market. Which, once we saw what the market in Modena was like, we were super sad not to have easy access to! The produce stands alone were amazing!
The main piazza – plus the cathedral – are UNESCO Heritage sites. And yes, I do keep track of all UNESCO sites I have been to🤗 Quick digression here: have I mentioned the Places Been app? It’s so much fun to check off new places! And new UNESCO sites! I do have the additional module for tracking airports because I am a geek that way. If tracking the state/national parks you have been to is your thing you can do this in the app too. Back to Modena. Let us begin as I usually do – with the cathedral. It’s big, yes. Not massive, but big. It has a bell tower. That we did not climb – not this time. It’s the inside that is utterly swoonable. There has been a church on the site since the 5th century. Dude. The current structure is the third church on the site and it was begun in 1099 – the second church was only around for thirty years or so. Ah, I could go on and on regarding the history of this lovely place, but I will just show you!
Modena, like many other Italians towns, makes use of covered porticos. These served to offer protection from the elements and additional space for merchants. I know in Bologna there was a requirement that the porticos be tall enough for a man on horseback to ride inside – based on the size I suspect the same requirement existed in Modena!
We weren’t in Modena for very long, so there is a lot we didn’t see. But of what we did see it seemed like a wonderful town!