From car to show off to element of shame? The parabola of the supercar image is taking on grotesque contours, especially for us who are the first country in the world for the production, innovation, planning and design of these technological masterpieces on wheels. The theme, however, is undeniably on the table and it is enough to scroll through the news headlines to understand the discourse: SUVs, supercars and famous brand names are used as brands of infamy. Aggravating circumstances of already very serious news events. Attention: they are not “wrong” titles (or rather “forced” as they say in the jargon) but perfect because they best represent the “common feeling”.
There are many reflections on this subject. But a particularly interesting one comes from Michele Serra in his column OK boomer of the Post. Here she is.
For my wedding, a rich and generous friend lent me a Maserati Quattroporte, in a shiny metallic brown. The color of horse chestnuts. At the ceremony in the town hall, there were twelve of us in all (witnesses and close relatives) and it is probable that the wedding lunch, in a village restaurant, cost less than what was spent on petrol. The official photographer – one of my wife’s teenage sons – took many more shots of the Maserati than of the bride and groom, and we still laugh about it today in the family.
I returned it the next morning with a mixture of regret and relief. I think I don’t have to explain my regret: the Quattroporte is a masterpiece, the engine is an eight-cylinder V that runs without a jolt, without a ripple, the car glides by as if it didn’t cost her much effort, the aesthetics are as discreet as it can be the passage of a car costing one hundred and eighty thousand euros, that is, not much, but just enough so that people don’t turn around on the street to look at you. The relief is less easy to explain. What had I got rid of, returning that car? Of what embarrassment? Let’s say that the two upbringings I received (the bourgeois one from my parents and then the communist one) converged on at least one point, or rather only on that: don’t show off, keep a discreet profile. Down the ridge.
“That’s a peasant” is a sentence that frequently echoed in my childhood, and branded the sentenced as few other things. And the term certainly didn’t serve to brand the peasant, but the rich man who didn’t know how to behave. The peasant in question was certainly not that of Di Vittorio and the peasant struggles, the laborer who raised his head (it seems that the term derives from the Latin cavare, to dig, to turn over the earth, with the suffix -one as in drudge, therefore peasant as ‘he who digs, who hoes the earth’, i.e. ‘farmer’).
No, the boor of my childhood was the one who flaunted or boasted. That he was trying to get noticed. It was the Milanese cumenda who arrived in Liguria with the “custom-built” (freshly recycled period word, I’ll explain later) and parked it in front of the Napoleon bar, on the Sanremo seafront, so that everyone could see it. It was the sciura with too many golds on her, even on the beach, always overdressed, who spoke of her husband’s economic successes in a loud enough voice to involve at least a dozen beach umbrellas. It was the new humanity that emerged from the economic boom as if from a centrifuge, excited and yet bewildered, as if it lacked the code to decipher its new, unexpected condition. Giorgio Bocca tells them beautifully, that euphoria and that progressive loss of restraints, in the Provincial, in my opinion one of the decisive books for understanding Italy in the second half of the twentieth century. And Vittorio Gassman’s Aurelia B24 also tells it very well in Overtaking, preceded a little by the pink Thunderbird in which Fred Buscaglione crashed drunk on a Roman dawn in 1960.
“Is it true that you have a gold Maserati?” they asked the great tenor Mario Del Monaco in a television interview that I still remember, fifty years later, as if it were yesterday. He replied, “Do you think I’m so rude?”
My borrowed Maserati, and the one attributed to Del Monaco, and the Jaguars and Ferrari Dinos parked in front of the Napoleon bar in the late 1960s have come back to my mind these days for two very different news stories, yet firmly connected to the myth of the luxury car which has evidently passed the pass of the new century unscathed. The first is the so-called “Minenna case”, the former director of the Customs Agency who, among other things, is accused of having “given custom-built cars to ministers”. Here is that word so vintage, custom-built, reappearing from the past, alternating with “luxury cars” and “supercars”. In reality, Minenna assigned the cars seized from the underworld not to ministers, but to ministries, and it is certainly not a detail. But these are topics of another debate – the one on information and justice – and so let’s move on.
The second news story is that of the youtuber accused of road murder: he had rented a blue Lamborghini to shoot a so-called “extreme” video, which cost the life of a child. Among the many images posted in his accounts, the “custom-built” cars have a notable and very well-defined role: blessed and admirable are those who own them, poor souls and laughable who go around with a silly machine. It is “richness” (often highly assumed) that makes a mockery of “poverty”. The father who kisses the bonnet of a Ferrari before taking a stroll couldn’t have imagined that that stroll would become a complete tour of the web after his son’s accident.
As is inevitable – the years go by – the parameters of my now remote training have very little to do with today. Because today, next to Gassman, on the Aurelia B24 and along the Aurelia near Castiglioncello, it would not be Trintignant but Fabrizio Corona. The difference is so macroscopic that it is not worth explaining it: let’s limit ourselves to saying that if my parents resurrected the phrase “that’s a peasant” it would lose all meaning, a drop of useless reproach in a sea in which getting noticed is the mainstream, the great current that everything moves. You may or may not like it (I don’t like it), but that’s how it works, and you might as well know.
But it struck me, a couple of generations after the boom that shaped us, and also deformed us, to note that the “custom-built” still retains an almost forbidden aura, just enough to captivate a minister; and investing someone with a Lambo seems much more serious than doing it with a Punto, or a van, or a tractor (there are two hundred thousand euro tractors!). It’s as if we haven’t digested something important yet. We are left in the middle of the esophagus, like a fish shank, with the doubt that well-being hasn’t done us any good – even if none of us is stupid enough to deny that it has made us feel much better, and in many of us.
More than moralism I think it’s a question of metabolism, we were a very poor country, from the cart pulled by the donkey (1940s) to mass motorization (1960s) just twenty years have passed. From the Jaguar of the cumenda to the Lambo of the youtuber kid, three times as many have passed but it is as if the euphoria, which at the beginning had something primitive, dare I say healthy, pulsating, had become stagnant and insane. Wealth as an obsession, as the only “must be”, and the enriched peasant who loses his exuberance (he was a social avant-garde, after all) and becomes a conformist mass. With a variant that saddens: it is, in large part, peasants not enriched.
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