Tomorrow, August 27, in St. Moritz the fifteenth edition of Passione Engadina kicks off. Four days of classic Italian cars, regularity rallies, alpine passes, Ladies’ Cup, Next Gen and, on Saturday afternoon, a showcase open to everyone at the Grand Hotel Kempinski. The theme is “The Italian Job,” also called “Little Italy”: Ferrari and Alfa are obvious, but also Maserati, Abarth, Cisitalia, Bizzarrini, Iso, O.S.C.A., Stanguellini, Zagato, Touring Superleggera and that procession of names that sound like a litany of minor saints of design. Brands born in a workshop, raised in a garage, died of beauty or bankruptcy.
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The strategy
Here’s the idea: bring your polished relics to Switzerland to drive them between Maloja, Spluga, Albula and Bernina. Your own country is not enough, you need the backdrop. The Dolomites, as we know, are too much ours; the Engadine has the merit of being clean, expensive, and sufficiently foreign to make every exhaust sound like an act of civilization. The Italian, when happy, needs a witness. Preferably rich and silent.
The event
Passione Engadina is not just any gathering. It’s a gentlemen’s rally, as they say when they want to specify that it’s not about winning but about not finishing last in style. It starts from the Surlej bridge with coffee and croissants, covering two hundred and thirty kilometers of curves that vintage cars face with that slightly labored dignity of people who know they are still beautiful. Then there is the display. The awards. The dinner. The remembrance. On Saturday the public can get close without a ticket: a democratic gesture in a context that is not democratic, and for this reason even more Italian. We love elegance, but we want someone to see it.
The dedication to the film
“The Italian Job” evokes the film with the Mini Coopers escaping down the stairs of Turin. Here the stairs are the passes, the Minis are replaced by objects worth an apartment in Milan, and the escape is upwards. But the title is right. The Italian car has always been a hit: of genius, of mind, of cash. Little money, many ideas, a line that seems drawn by someone who was in a hurry to fall in love. Then the failure, the sale, the oblivion, the collector who rescues it and takes it to two thousand meters because the landscape justifies it.
Looking at those cars, or rather those “bodies” — the curves of a Zagato, the fierce look of a Bizzarrini, the aristocratic modesty of an Autobianchi — is an exercise in nostalgia without tears. You don’t cry for the Italy that was. You note, with a smile, that we are still capable of producing beauty provided it is already old. New cars, those that come out of factories today, have too many computers and too much virtue. These, instead, smell – pardon, they scent – of gasoline, leather, wrong decisions made on an afternoon in 1963. They are human. That’s why they are liked.
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For the young
There is also the Next Gen, reserved for under 25s, this year with the electric Panda. A sign of the times, or a small surrender. Italy teaching its children the noise of the past while putting them in a silent and good object. Typical: we preserve the myth and delegate the future. The ladies have their Cup. The gentlemen have their stopwatches. The organizers have strict selection: not all Italian cars are admitted, only those of “undeniable historical value.” Even passion, here, needs a committee.
One could smile at this ritual of men (and some women) who spend fortunes to make an engine roar in a landscape that would look good even without it. One could say it’s luxury, it’s a game, it’s a postcard Italy for those who can afford it. All true. And yet, when a Cisitalia or an Iso crosses a hairpin above Silvaplana, something happens that press releases don’t say: for a moment the car stops being a problem and becomes a form again. A line. A sound.
Tomorrow they leave. Fifteen years of this ritual, and already talk of 2027 with eighty Ferraris for the Cavallino’s eightieth anniversary. Italians, as we know, don’t know how to stop. Even if the father of this event – Paolo Spalluto – has already announced that soon he will pass the baton to his son. Good. As long as there is someone willing to bring a Bandini or an Ermini to St. Moritz, it will mean that our noblest vice — confusing beauty with salvation — is not yet extinguished.
Then, on Sunday, everyone will return home. The car in the garage, the Engadine in memory, Italy in its place: a little lower, a little noisier, always uphill.
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