A brief peroration

I am waiting for the primer coat to dry on the Lancia so I thought I might compose a short note on what it is about Italian cars that I admire. I always seem to own more than one – at this moment the tally is three – and they consume money and spare time to the exclusion of other things in life like second houses and overseas holidays that seem to come more easily to my Japanese car driving friends. I would not describe myself as obsessed but rather deeply engaged.
It is the aesthetics for me. This includes the beauty of form but also engineering and dynamics. I prefer cars from a sensualist culture where you can tell that someone has laboured over a detail that other manufacturers would consider unnecessary. Alternatively, positive aspects can be found in things that would be a compromise in lesser hands. Old Italian cars are part of a craft tradition. You can see the thought and the hand work that went into them.
One of the pleasures of looking at Italian cars is the DNA that links different models through both the studio and the individual designers. With the 105 series Alfa GTV it begins at the front wing where a fold rises up to a peak that runs the length of the car. It softens as it goes until it reaches the rear where the tail panel turns inwards. These are hand modeled lines, derived from freehand drawings that were turned into wooden bucks and then into steel. You forget that the side glass is flat, so skillfully are the various curves pulled this way and that in the sweep from front to rear. The shape dates back to 1960 and the 21 year old prodigy Georgetto Guigiaro who was just starting at Bertone.  

My current project is a 1963 Lancia Flavia Pininfarina Coupe. I bought it because I wanted something from the Pininfarina stable at the time it was producing its key designs for Ferarri. The contrast between the two is profound. If the GTV is about form, the Flavia is about detail. Pininfarina cars were almost generic and their styling was interchangeable between any other client it had at the time. If BMC had asked for a coupe Austin Cambridge it would have looked just like my Flavia. I still don't know who designed my car. The studio was overseen by Aldo Brovarone but there were half a dozen stylists under him and he answered to Giovanni Battista (Pinin) Farina.  
There is a cool, technocratic side to Pininfarina that complements minimalist architecture. They worked out how to make a roof look cantilevered (minimise the front pillar, turn the rear pillar into a slab, run the line straight through at the top of the front screen, recess the rear screen) and how to make fins work with boot lids (run the inside edge of the fin into the shut line, drop the boot lid into the hole. Look at the tail end of a P6 Rover to see how influential this was). While Bertone eschewed brightwork, the Flavia has lots of it including Baroque details like little chrome plinths for the wipers where the GTV's simply poke through the valance panel.

These differences communicate the essence of both cars. The GTV is about the heart and the Lancia about the mind. You get a sense of this when you open the bonnet. The Alfa motor is all polished alloy and carburettors while the Lancia's flat four sits in front of the wheel centre and is almost invisible in the undersealed engine bay. It was only when I had the whole thing apart that I saw wonderful castings that the factory painted black so that they were rendered invisible. I also noted that all the bolts were copper plated. No wonder they went broke.