Tuscany's Divine Tourist Trap

Recently, we made our annual summer pilgrimage to a small hill town in Tuscany called Panzano in Chianti to buy bistecca and soppressata at Antica Macelleria Cecchini, the shop run by legendary Italian butcher Dario Cecchini. We were stunned to find it teeming with—gasp—sightseers. True, as butcher shops go, Cecchini's is more hangout-friendly than most. He always has opera or bouncy Seventies pop blaring, and there's a long, wooden table filled with bottles of Chianti and platters of bite-size sample—meatloaf topped with spicy red jelly; chunks of fennel-laced porchetta; a huge bowl of raw, whipped, herb-infused lardo; slices of toast drizzled with olive oil and a sprinkle of Profumo del Chianti (Cecchini's secret blend of sea salts and aromatic herbs). But it's a good bet that what caused the spike in visitors was Cecchini's headlining role in Bill Buford's compulsively readable kitchen memoir, Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. Antica Macelleria Cecchini is not much larger than a restaurant walk-in, so to secure bragging rights to having set foot inside, camera-toting tourists had to shoulder through the packed mob and "pardon me" their way towards the snacks. After that, it was chew, shuffle an inch or two forward, swallow, make a U-turn at the back wall, check out the rendering of a pig's head sculpted from lardo (shown here) behind the glassed-in meat counter, gaze for a moment at Buford's big-fisted, white-aproned mentor, and then file back outside with a "Now what?" expression. But at least they could say they had laid eyes on the poetry-spouting renaissance meat maestro. Next time they should try Cecchini's restaurant, Solocicca, just across the narrow road, for a homey, multi-course beef-and-pork feast—and way more bragging rights.