Da Antonio is a barbershop in the elegant city centre of Modena, northern Italy, and as I peer through its window on a sunny afternoon, I notice two things. The first, impossible to miss, is a large black-and-white photograph on the wall of a barber giving a haircut to the establishment’s most famous regular client, the legendary Enzo Ferrari. The second is that the shop is empty, and I seize the chance to get an impromptu haircut, and to talk sports cars.
I am tended by Alessandro D’Elia, whose father Massimo and great-uncle Antonio were Ferrari’s regular barbers in the later years of his life, until his death in 1988 at the age of 90. The man who founded the world’s most prestigious sporting car brand would pop in every morning for espresso, gossip and a shave, apart from Sundays and Mondays, when the barbers would visit him at his home. The routine, D’Elia tells me, was unbreakable.
