Lamborghini offers the ability to select which cows become your seats- just don't stand behind them!

"Don't stand too close to the cow," they told us, "or else you're going to get shit on like you won't believe." The guy next to me wasn't listening. He was standing immediately next to number 726, a 30-month-old female Holstein that had, minutes earlier, been escorted into the abattoir. A perennially cheerful Italian man pressed a stunbolt pistol to the cattle's head and squeezed its trigger. With a pneumatic kwa-thoonk, the device launched a stainless steel piston into the cow's brainpan at speeds approaching the supersonic. The animal let out a protesting howl and then, half death throe and half being scared — literally — shitless, it let loose a jet of liquid excrement that exploded off the back wall, peppering the inattentive journal's slacks with brown leopard spots. Like a high-rise that defies gravity for a second after its demolition charges have lit off, the cow stood bolt upright in dead silence, then twisted and crumpled to the ground.

What 726 didn't — couldn't — have known was that she was destined for bigger things than Fendi bags or Gucci loafers. Lamborghini made a big splash when it announced its Ad Personam program at this year's Detroit auto show, which allowed buyers of Murciélagos and Gallardos to spec out the minutiae of their cars, from colors and materials to the type of thread used — some buyers shun synthetics — in its stitching. But what Lamborghini had kept quiet up until last month was a similar program already in place for buyers of its million-dollar Reventón supercar. According to Lamborghini spokespeople, who talked to us at a dinner the evening before we visited the cattle farm, it was "respecting the ultimate connection between man and machine." To everyone else, it meant that Reventón buyers were given a book full of cattle mugshots, and could handpick the animals that would be turned into their steering wheel, armrest, and parking brake boot. Standing there, watching the process unfold, there was a palpable vibe running through us assembled journalists, even shit-britches at the front of the pack: You've got to be fucking kidding me.

We weren't alone in that sentiment. Last month, after the FedEx truck rumbled away and my editor poked at the envelope's pull strip, he stood in the doorway to my office with a swatch of leather and an invitation from Lamborghini to visit Al-Pella SpA, a boutique cattle farm located in the heel of Il Mezzogiorno. He hadn't read off the first paragraph on the page before I blurted out, "You've got to be fucking kidding me!" I got the same reaction from senior editor Fowle when I told him about the trip. Even my mother, who had just recently been thunderstruck by the opulence of valet parking at the mall — At the mall! Doesn't that just take all! — let slip that, "People have gone off the deep end!" Which is as close as her crushing Irish Catholic guilt would let her get to saying, "You've got to be fucking kidding me!"

"Most buyers' first reaction was, in fact, disbelief," said Lamborghini spokesman Pietro Ventimiglia, as farmhands wrapped a chain around 726's hind legs. An overhead motor hummed in increasing protest as it pulled the cow's half-ton body erect. "But this is just the next logical progression of truly letting us build your dream for you."

While Ventimiglia talked, a worker was following the next logical progression of turning 726 into couture, massaging the cow's neck until he felt the edge of the jawbone, then plunging a knife between it and the first vertebra. Pulling the blade across in one swift motion, he severed both the jugular vein and carotid artery. There are 13 gallons of blood coursing through the average cow, and with both vessels severed it began issuing forth in great, chugging pressure waves, like a two-liter bottle turned on its end, draining down the bottom of the trough. The woman next to me began shifting uneasily.

A part of you expects that a slaughterhouse is going to smell rank. But what nobody tells you is that the smell has a temperature. A consistency. A viscosity. The blood gives the air a sticky, alkaline bitterness that coats your lungs and makes you feel as though you're breathing with a wet pillowcase on your head. Three years ago, Al-Pella was the target of a Greenpeace campaign designed to show that cow fart was damaging to upper atmospheric ozone. Which may be true, but outgassing from the rest of the animal ain't exactly a bed of roses, either. I had always been convinced that my constitution was made of sterner stuff than this, but after fighting back the urge to gag — twice — my confidence in my steel stomach was certainly breached.

Once the body has bled out (the industry refers to it using the clinically sterile terminology exsanguination) it's time for Vittorio Saldati to shine. Blessed with the Italian enthusiasm for life that gives his countrymen a reputation for their halogen smiles, Saldati is the third generation of hideworkers to ply his trade in the farms around the Gulf of Salerno. Never married, and with no children, Saldati is the end of his bloodline. His name, and his family's tradition of leathermen, will die with him.

It is Saldati's job to ensure that as much usable hide is kept as possible: There are only about fifty square feet of reclaimable skin on each animal, and the molds for the Reventón's interior accents require at least thirty-five. Each hide is also heinously expensive: Al-Pella maintains only 200 cattle on its 300-acre plot, and the yield from each animal is so important that the company installed plastic fencing to prevent nicks and scars that can be caused by barbed wire.

Wheeling a stainless cart over to the carcass, Saldati cheerfully explained the history of Al-Pella's leatherworks as he began making incisions with a bitagli, a tiny, curved metal tool that looks like a scythe rendered in 1/24th scale.

"The fascisti run Alfa Romeo in 1932," he told me, referring to the government takeover of the company following the departure of Nicola Romeo. Saldati dragged the blade through the cow's flank with a wet schlock. "And the, ah..."

He paused before muttering to the translator, who looked at me and said, "Heads of state."

"Heads of state," Saldati continued, "They need beautiful cars." He looked at me before gesturing with his right hand, fingers pinched together and pointed upwards. "Meraviglioso!" He paused to look for my approval and I nodded it.

So the Ufficio di Acquisizione gave Al-Pella its first commission — the interior fitments for a 6C Spider that was the official state car of Benito Mussolini. No expense was spared to make the dictator's car perfect. It took nearly fifteen cattle to produce enough flawless hide for the two-seat Alfa, which recently failed to sell at auction for $894,000.

With the incisions made, Saldati clasped the tail in a clip and began fleshing the hide from the body. Working from the tail downwards, he gingerly peeled the skin back along the incisions, tugging it with little fingertip pulses while using the outer curve of the bitagli to sever the fat and muscle where it stuck. Modern methods skin the entire carcass mechanically, pulling and stretching until the skin is forcibly rent from its backing. The problem, said Saldati, is that this causes stretch marks and stresses that destroy the grain of the hide.

"Is fine," he grinned, "for cheap shoes."

A cowhide, I'd been told, weighs up to 200 pounds when soaked with blood and fat — even after the exsanguination and fleshing — and requires some time to cool out. But cooling the hides is a perverse race against rapacious and hungry bacteria, which begin devouring the flesh as soon as the cow is headbutted by the stunbolt. It may take four hours for the moist center of a hide to reach room temperature, but by that time bacteria will have dissolved the fibrous material retaining the outer skin, which makes it slough off the hide like a burn victim.

That's where the salthouse comes in. If you grew up in the north, you've seen highway salt repositories with a roof like an inverted acorn. Al-Pella's salthouse is exactly that, its architecture seemingly removed from some stretch of Michigan interstate and deposited by the Mediterranean shore. It couldn't look like any more a conspicuously American transplant if it were wearing flip-flops and burping in public.

Freed from its body, the hide is flopped onto a gurney and sent on the 100-foot trip from the abattoir to the salthouse, steaming in the cool morning air. Once there, the skin is laid out on piles of Mediterranean sea salt — the same stuff that we pay $10 a pound for is so common that it gets used to soak up cattle viscera. The salt desiccates the hides so thoroughly that microorganisms can't breed on it.

From the salthouse, the hides go to the tannery. At least, I'm told that's the case, because it's at this point that three gregarious Al-Pella employees cut our tour short. They were a tag team of upturned palms and pleasant apologies that we couldn't, in fact, see the next step of the process. A trade secret, you see. At least, I'll assume that's what they were saying, because even with my diligent study of the winsome Italian tongue, I couldn't pick out a single damned word. It sounded like Pig-Latin Spanish.

"Non Importa," I told them, trying out the little language I could remember.

Which, if you're slow to pick up the context, means "I don't care," or in this case, "it's no big deal." Although to judge from their reactions, I think they took it to mean, "apologize all you want, I don't care, and I hope you go to hell for the inconvenience." They frowned and turned their palms over, making little flicking motions with their fingers. I didn't need a translator to figure that one out.

The conductor shouted more words I didn't understand, and the train from Tuturano to Bologna began rolling out. From Bologna, it's a 40-minute ride east on the A14 to Lamborghini's headquarters in Sant'Agata. And from there, it's a five minute walk across the factory floor to the saddlery, past the parallel Gallardo and Murciélago assembly lines. Each car in the queue progresses through assembly stations, versus a continually moving line, and a klaxon sounds every 54 minutes when the line scoots forward one vehicle. Once clear of the assembly area, you reach the point at which Al-Pella's hides are transformed into interior appointments. The saddlery occupies a low-roofed back corner of the factory, and its red brick flooring is luminous under the pulsing white from overhead fluorescents.

Unlike mass-produced leather trim from other automakers, which is stamped out on computer-controlled mills using sharp steel molds that resemble cookie cutters, Lamborghini insists on crafting its interiors using traditional methods that have been popular since Watt's steam engine arrived on the scene. Chalk that up as to why beautiful interiors, like wearing white sweaters and overthrowing government for the hell of it, are one of those things Italians just do better than others.

Of the twelve women that comprise Lamborghini's interior shop — "It's woman's job," I'm told by a Gallardo line worker who reads my surprise correctly — only two are allowed to work on the Reventón. Annalisa Dante has been handcrafting leather in Sant'Agata since the Countach LP400s were rolling down the line in the early '70s. The head of the Reventón's upholstery program, she is sprawled across an orange hide that's spread across a cork-topped workbench, where she deftly maneuvers stiff cardboard guides and a scalpel, carefully planning each shape from leather that's free of scratches and insect bites.

I asked her how she felt about knowing that specific animals were chosen to be the skins she's working with. Silence. Too hardball, I guessed, so I tried for conversational. Was it interesting during the five owners that Lamborghini's been through since she'd started working here? Nothing. With one hand holding the template and another tracing its outline through the hide, she didn't look up but grumbled, "Non Importa."

Touché, signora.

Dante's counterpart is Mariangela Gervasi, who visibly bristled when one of the journalists behind me let slip the word "seamstress." Gervasi has been responsible for piecing together interiors on nearly 6000 different Lamborghinis over the past 25 years, and during the last 15 she's kept a notecard — what color stitching, what color leather, what dye lot the hides came from — for each in case the car needs repair. Surrounded at her workstation by bobbins of thread dyed in vibrant fun-house colors, Gervasi was hand-stitching the outer wrap of a steering wheel when our tour stopped by.

"It is excess," she told me, when pressed for her thoughts on buyers meeting the meat. "But Lamborghini is made to be excess. Nobody buys Lamborghinis for need. Lamborghinis... are desire." Does she own a Lamborghini? "No," she said, producing a filthy, rubber-headed Fiat key with the logo worn down to dull nubs. "But I desire."

On our way out, it was Pietro Ventimiglia, who had caught a late train to Bologna and was just meeting up with our group, that led us through Lamborghini's new heritage museum and delivery center. A completed Reventón sat in the corner, where it would be cocooned inside a felt-lined shipping bag before being dispatched to its new owner. Ventimiglia shuffled from one thousand-dollar loafer to the other when pressed for details on the Reventón's new owner, telling us only that it was headed for the Emirate of Dubai.

I was peering through the car's window when I saw them, and my jaw dropped through forces I could neither control, command, or compel. The gang of ignition keys in a bag on the passenger seat, lashed together with a woven steel lanyard that was clasped at both ends to a polished Lamborghini medallion. And two plastic yellow ear tags, bearing imprints of a stock number and the name Al-Pella SpA, were clipped onto the same loop, ready for delivery to the car's new owner.

It's at this point that our lawyers want me to tell you that none of the above actually happened. Everything you have just read is, pardon the Lamborghini pun, bullshit. Not existing in the city of Tuturano, Al-Pella SpA doesn't produce fine cowhides from 200 cattle and 300 acres that the nonexistent company doesn't own. There is, indeed, a Lamborghini factory in Sant'Agata, and there are twelve women who are responsible for stitching interiors employed there, but "Annalisa Dante" and "Mariangela Gervasi" are not among them. Likewise, "Vittorio Saldati" can't uphold his family's long and storied tradition of leatherwork, as he exists only in the space between my graying temples. All of them are borne from the imagination. Chimeras blessed with names from "The Sopranos." My mother, however, still can't get over valet parking at the mall. It really does take all.