The maestro and his magic knife

HE’S called “the Michelangelo of meat,” a grandiose, if not downright laughable, appellation -- laughable, that is, until you see him in action at his butcher shop in Tuscany.

We did just that not too long ago, eager to meet a man as well-known for reciting Dante as for cutting steaks and making sausages. Sure enough, when we walked into Antica Macelleria Cecchini, there he was, larger than life.

Dario Cecchini, a burly, handsome man, clad in loud plaid slacks, was standing on a raised platform behind the counter -- the better to see and be seen -- intoning poetry in a deep Italian baritone that all but drowned out the classical music playing in the background.

He had a twinkle in his eye and a red handkerchief (a gift from his longtime, Texas-born girlfriend, Anne Marie Scichili) knotted around his neck, and when we mentioned our friends in L.A. who had told us about him, he leaned over the cash register to wrap me in a bone-crushing bearhug.

“Ah, Marvino and Judy,” he boomed, sharing their names with everyone in the shop -- which, as usual, was jammed with locals busy gossiping, laughing, listening to his stories and tasting the various free samples of his meats (and a local wine) that he always has spread out on a large butcher block.

Dario’s family has sold meat from this tiny butcher shop in the picturesque village of Panzano, in the heart of the Chianti wine region, for more than 250 years. But his parents originally wanted something better than butchery for their only son. When he was 20, they sent him to veterinary school in Pisa. He’d completed two years when his father died. Dario returned home to help care for his mother and 16-year-old sister and discovered that he preferred cutting dead animals to treating sick ones.

That was 26 years ago, and Dario -- everyone calls him Dario -- is now, at 47, a living legend, identified not only as “the Michelangelo of meat” but also as “the maestro of meat,” “the Messiah of meat” and “the poet butcher of Panzano.” He gives public readings of Dante, both on formal occasions and -- sometimes -- spontaneously, between courses, while having dinner in a local restaurant.

Dario may be the world’s only global celebrity butcher. He helped Alice Waters celebrate the 30th anniversary of Chez Panisse. He delivered his handmade sausages to the Four Seasons in New York. He periodically butchers cow carcasses on live Italian television -- turning up on one such show not long ago, saying, “I am your butcher; you shall have no other butcher besides me.”

When asked his address a couple of years ago by a tourist who wanted to write him a letter, he said, “Just put ‘Dario Cecchini, Butcher, Italy,’ and it’ll get here.’ ”

She did.

It did.

In 2001, when the European Union banned the sale of beef with the vertebral bone, which had been linked to mad cow disease, Dario conducted a mock funeral in his shop on the last day that the famous Bistecca Fiorentina from the Chianina breed of Tuscan cow could be sold legally. He auctioned off 200 huge pieces of steak, netting more than $50,000 -- all of it going to a children’s hospital in Florence (including the $4,600 that Elton John paid for one 5-pound steak).

“Tuscans like to celebrate gluttony and lust, and the Fiorentina is all about those things,” Dario said at the funeral. “When I eat a Fiorentina beefsteak, I feel all of the Tuscan Renaissance flow through my veins. Eating a Fiorentina is like reading Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ looking at Giotto’s bell tower and Michelangelo’s ‘David.’ It is the pleasure of life.”

At the end of the ceremony, Dario put a 50-pound, yard-long slab of beef in a walnut coffin and had it driven off in a long, black hearse. A small gravestone for the Bistecca Fiorentina is now permanently affixed to the outside wall of his shop. It says, “Reduced to an invalid, she preferred death.”

But Dario is nothing if not resilient. When we showed up there, he announced that he had a new -- and legal -- cut of beef: “It’s la Bistecca Panzanese,” he proclaimed, as if introducing a new opera. “I like it even better than the Bistecca Fiorentina.”

Then he handed my wife, Lucy, and me a sheet of paper that described the 4-pound “monumental cut from the heart of the thigh of beef, especially selected” by Dario himself.

The written rules for its preparation and consumption were precise:

“Take from the refrigerator 10 to 12 hours before cooking.

“Grill on a red-hot grill, five minutes on either side and 15 minutes standing up.

“Do not use metal instruments, only wood palettes or your hands.

“The real lovers of food should enjoy the Panzanese ‘naturally,’ without adding anything. A bit of extra-virgin olive oil and a dash of ‘profumo del Chianti’ (a special seasoning of unrefined Sicilian sea salt and wild local herbs, created and packaged by Dario) ... are the only allowances. Meditate and delight profoundly. This is not only food but an emotion....

“Bear in mind,” the sheet said, that the steak would provide not only “profound physical enjoyment, extreme sensations [and] stimulation to drink a ‘big’ red wine” but would also “awaken the affectionate senses (with all that follows).”

We took one to the house we were renting, a mere 20-minute walk away, and cooked it the next night on the small outdoor grill in our garden, overlooking the terraced vines in the middle of the Fontodi Vineyard, about 45 minutes south of Florence.

It was a spectacular steak -- deeply flavorful, simultaneously chewy and buttery, certainly one of the best pieces of meat I’ve ever eaten.

We have many splendid memories of our trip to Tuscany but none, I suspect, that will remain as fresh as the taste of that steak -- and the sight of Dario, almost mythic in appearance, rising above his meat counter, a knife in his hand and a poem on his lips.

David Shaw can be reached at [email protected].