Write Up THE ITALIAN JOB
- Thread starter Pauliebhoy
- Start date
The receptionist now has a ginger flavour about her!
It's intriguing Dave as to who now has possession of it. I have an Italian lawyer who dealt with my citizenship application, and will get her to make some enquiries. Maybe in 2027 we can have a Tuscany run to rival @Stevo7682 and @andyglymGreat story Paul and the grass around the house looks well tended. Great pics
Maybe in 2027 we can have a Tuscany run to rival @Stevo7682 and @andyglym
Count us in Paul if this comes to fruition ! - Great write up and pics !
Count us in Paul if this comes to fruition ! - Great write up and pics !
Love the story so far, fantastic to be able to trace all you have. As said by others, someone's looking after the house, must be.
Weather looks good too. Enjoy
Weather looks good too. Enjoy
- Joined
- Feb 18, 2016
- Points
- 246
- Model of Z
- Z3M Imola and Z4 (e89)
Us too, we loved our 2019 Tuscany road trip. Been talking about going back.Maybe in 2027 we can have a Tuscany run to rival @Stevo7682 and @andyglym
Count us in Paul if this comes to fruition ! - Great write up and pics !
Epic stuff mate, just epic
Day 11 & 12
Barga Scottish Festival time.
So, as promised, I dressed for the occasion. Day one was the obligatory Tartan Army uniform. Day two was a bit more relaxed, so the Celtic FC top came out instead of the Bargascot T-shirt.
I felt fairly confident wandering around in Celtic colours, having already spotted plenty of others doing the same. Rangers tops in Barga seem to be about as common as a roof rack on a Z. The Italians around here do tend to lean more towards the Pope Leo side of the fence, if you get my drift.
Anyway, the festival itself was all bagpipes, Scottish dancing and enough tartan to carpet the Highlands.
The shops had gone completely Scottish too: Irn-Bru, tablet that melts in your hand before you've even managed to get it into your mouth, tartan hats and scarves — very practical in 34°C heat — fish and chips and, naturally, malt whisky.
Basically, everything you'd normally find in Tesco, only with more bagpipes.
There were two types of dancing. First, Highland dancing, which I know a bit about because my daughter won plenty of prizes doing it. Then there was Scottish country dancing — the stuff you do at a ceilidh: Gay Gordons, Eightsome Reels and that sort of thing.
Now, I went to school in the east end of Glasgow and, believe it or not, they actually tried to teach us this.
The east end of Glasgow. A place where, if you put your arm out of the car window to indicate right, your watch was gone before you'd completed the turn.
To make matters worse, the dancing classes were single sex.
“Hey Shuggie, fancy a wee Gay Gordons?”
“Aye, don't mind if ah dae, Boaby.”
Somehow, we survived.
Anyway, it was great fun and one of those things where you can now say: we came, we saw, we ceilidh'd.
Back to the discovery of my great-grandfather's house.
Last night we went out for dinner and booked the same place again for tonight. When I gave the waitress my surname, she immediately said:
“Ah... the family from Pagnana.”
That got my attention.
To cut a long story short, it turns out the house was also known as Tromboni at one point and, in more recent times, was occupied by Fabio and Pietro.
I've already got a few things I want my Italian lawyer to unravel for me, so this gives us another useful piece of the puzzle.
And, for @Mint benefit, the much-hyped “surprise” did not, in fact, involve litigation, writs, injunctions or anybody being dragged before an Italian court.
It was considerably more wholesome.
There was a slide projection in the square celebrating Italian families who had gone to Scotland and made good — and my great-grandfather was the very first slide.
That was quite a moment.
Tomorrow we're off to see what Enzo started in maranello.We've got some sort of factory bus tour lined up as well as the museum. The last time I was there was about 15 years ago, so I'm really looking forward to seeing it all again.
Ciao
Barga Scottish Festival time.
So, as promised, I dressed for the occasion. Day one was the obligatory Tartan Army uniform. Day two was a bit more relaxed, so the Celtic FC top came out instead of the Bargascot T-shirt.
I felt fairly confident wandering around in Celtic colours, having already spotted plenty of others doing the same. Rangers tops in Barga seem to be about as common as a roof rack on a Z. The Italians around here do tend to lean more towards the Pope Leo side of the fence, if you get my drift.
Anyway, the festival itself was all bagpipes, Scottish dancing and enough tartan to carpet the Highlands.
The shops had gone completely Scottish too: Irn-Bru, tablet that melts in your hand before you've even managed to get it into your mouth, tartan hats and scarves — very practical in 34°C heat — fish and chips and, naturally, malt whisky.
Basically, everything you'd normally find in Tesco, only with more bagpipes.
There were two types of dancing. First, Highland dancing, which I know a bit about because my daughter won plenty of prizes doing it. Then there was Scottish country dancing — the stuff you do at a ceilidh: Gay Gordons, Eightsome Reels and that sort of thing.
Now, I went to school in the east end of Glasgow and, believe it or not, they actually tried to teach us this.
The east end of Glasgow. A place where, if you put your arm out of the car window to indicate right, your watch was gone before you'd completed the turn.
To make matters worse, the dancing classes were single sex.
“Hey Shuggie, fancy a wee Gay Gordons?”
“Aye, don't mind if ah dae, Boaby.”
Somehow, we survived.
Anyway, it was great fun and one of those things where you can now say: we came, we saw, we ceilidh'd.
Back to the discovery of my great-grandfather's house.
Last night we went out for dinner and booked the same place again for tonight. When I gave the waitress my surname, she immediately said:
“Ah... the family from Pagnana.”
That got my attention.
To cut a long story short, it turns out the house was also known as Tromboni at one point and, in more recent times, was occupied by Fabio and Pietro.
I've already got a few things I want my Italian lawyer to unravel for me, so this gives us another useful piece of the puzzle.
And, for @Mint benefit, the much-hyped “surprise” did not, in fact, involve litigation, writs, injunctions or anybody being dragged before an Italian court.
It was considerably more wholesome.
There was a slide projection in the square celebrating Italian families who had gone to Scotland and made good — and my great-grandfather was the very first slide.
That was quite a moment.
Tomorrow we're off to see what Enzo started in maranello.We've got some sort of factory bus tour lined up as well as the museum. The last time I was there was about 15 years ago, so I'm really looking forward to seeing it all again.
Ciao
Last edited:
Day 13
We packed everything up on Sunday night, then rewarded ourselves with an amazing pizza at a little place just around the corner from the hotel. A very satisfactory way to end our stay in Barga.
We left Barga at 7.00am because the sat nav was telling us that the 100-mile journey to the Ferrari Museum was going to take three and a half hours. This seemed slightly ridiculous, but off we went.
It didn’t take long to discover why.
Instead of anything resembling a nice quick main road, we headed straight into the mountains. The route was absolutely stunning, taking us through beautiful villages and some spectacular scenery. We stopped for coffee at the ski resort of Abetone, about 1,500 metres above sea level, which was rather different from the heat we’d been experiencing in Barga.
Eventually we arrived at the Ferrari Museum, which was absolutely mobbed. Thankfully, we’d booked online, so while everyone else appeared to be joining a queue roughly the length of the Monaco Grand Prix circuit, we sailed straight in.
We had two bookings: one for the factory bus tour and another for the museum, so we decided to do the bus tour first.
To be fair, it isn’t really a factory tour in the traditional sense. It’s more a tour around the Ferrari plant, and absolutely no photographs are allowed. The aluminium body shells are manufactured about 18km away in Modena and transported to Maranello on specially adapted trailers.
Once they arrive, the shells sit on wheeled bogies outside the main assembly area. We actually managed to get about a 30-second glimpse inside the production line when our bus stopped to let a test car out.
From my point of view, that was probably one of the most interesting parts of the whole visit.
I was quite surprised by what I saw because the cars don’t appear to move continuously down a conventional production line. Manufacturing and setting up production plants was what my business did for 15 years, and normally the quickest way of assembling anything is to keep the product moving steadily through the various stages.
Ferrari, however, clearly has a slightly different philosophy: quality first, speed somewhere considerably further down the list.
Around 60 body shells enter production each day and around 60 completed cars come out, with the average car taking roughly seven days to work its way through the process, depending on the model. Once completed, every car is driven around Ferrari’s own test circuit to make sure that everything works exactly as it should.
I suppose when someone has just handed you several hundred thousand pounds for a car, “we’re fairly sure it works” probably isn’t an acceptable final inspection.
There are around 5,000 people working on the site, with approximately 1,000 of them involved in the Formula 1 division. The remainder work across design, testing, product development, prototypes, pre-manufacturing, production, logistics, purchasing and, naturally, management. There are always managers.
From a production point of view, though, I have to take my hat off to Ferrari.
The V6 and V8 cars are manufactured on the ground floor, while the V12 models are assembled on an upper floor. That’s something I’ve always been a big advocate of: if you can build upwards, you effectively double your usable production space without doubling the size of the building or many of the overheads.
So although Ferrari may not win any prizes for high-volume manufacturing, it’s very obvious that this isn’t what they are trying to achieve. They are building relatively small numbers of very expensive cars, extremely carefully — and they certainly know their market.
Tonight we’re staying in Modena and heading to a restaurant that also doubles as a butcher’s shop.
Apparently, once you’ve checked in and been shown to your table, you wander over to the butcher’s counter, choose your beef, pork, chicken, lamb or veal, and they cook it exactly how you want it.
This has the potential to be either absolutely brilliant or financially dangerous.
Tomorrow — Tuesday — is going to be a very food-orientated day, focusing on Parmesan cheese, Parma ham and balsamic vinegar production.
Thankfully, not all in the same factory.
We packed everything up on Sunday night, then rewarded ourselves with an amazing pizza at a little place just around the corner from the hotel. A very satisfactory way to end our stay in Barga.
We left Barga at 7.00am because the sat nav was telling us that the 100-mile journey to the Ferrari Museum was going to take three and a half hours. This seemed slightly ridiculous, but off we went.
It didn’t take long to discover why.
Instead of anything resembling a nice quick main road, we headed straight into the mountains. The route was absolutely stunning, taking us through beautiful villages and some spectacular scenery. We stopped for coffee at the ski resort of Abetone, about 1,500 metres above sea level, which was rather different from the heat we’d been experiencing in Barga.
Eventually we arrived at the Ferrari Museum, which was absolutely mobbed. Thankfully, we’d booked online, so while everyone else appeared to be joining a queue roughly the length of the Monaco Grand Prix circuit, we sailed straight in.
We had two bookings: one for the factory bus tour and another for the museum, so we decided to do the bus tour first.
To be fair, it isn’t really a factory tour in the traditional sense. It’s more a tour around the Ferrari plant, and absolutely no photographs are allowed. The aluminium body shells are manufactured about 18km away in Modena and transported to Maranello on specially adapted trailers.
Once they arrive, the shells sit on wheeled bogies outside the main assembly area. We actually managed to get about a 30-second glimpse inside the production line when our bus stopped to let a test car out.
From my point of view, that was probably one of the most interesting parts of the whole visit.
I was quite surprised by what I saw because the cars don’t appear to move continuously down a conventional production line. Manufacturing and setting up production plants was what my business did for 15 years, and normally the quickest way of assembling anything is to keep the product moving steadily through the various stages.
Ferrari, however, clearly has a slightly different philosophy: quality first, speed somewhere considerably further down the list.
Around 60 body shells enter production each day and around 60 completed cars come out, with the average car taking roughly seven days to work its way through the process, depending on the model. Once completed, every car is driven around Ferrari’s own test circuit to make sure that everything works exactly as it should.
I suppose when someone has just handed you several hundred thousand pounds for a car, “we’re fairly sure it works” probably isn’t an acceptable final inspection.
There are around 5,000 people working on the site, with approximately 1,000 of them involved in the Formula 1 division. The remainder work across design, testing, product development, prototypes, pre-manufacturing, production, logistics, purchasing and, naturally, management. There are always managers.
From a production point of view, though, I have to take my hat off to Ferrari.
The V6 and V8 cars are manufactured on the ground floor, while the V12 models are assembled on an upper floor. That’s something I’ve always been a big advocate of: if you can build upwards, you effectively double your usable production space without doubling the size of the building or many of the overheads.
So although Ferrari may not win any prizes for high-volume manufacturing, it’s very obvious that this isn’t what they are trying to achieve. They are building relatively small numbers of very expensive cars, extremely carefully — and they certainly know their market.
Tonight we’re staying in Modena and heading to a restaurant that also doubles as a butcher’s shop.
Apparently, once you’ve checked in and been shown to your table, you wander over to the butcher’s counter, choose your beef, pork, chicken, lamb or veal, and they cook it exactly how you want it.
This has the potential to be either absolutely brilliant or financially dangerous.
Tomorrow — Tuesday — is going to be a very food-orientated day, focusing on Parmesan cheese, Parma ham and balsamic vinegar production.
Thankfully, not all in the same factory.