In St. Moritz, a Maserati MC20 Cielo “first series” won the Colpo di Fulmine Award during the Passione Engadina concours d’elegance. The name of the award is already a little masterpiece. Elsewhere originality, philological consistency, restoration, rarity are rewarded. Here at the Swiss event, love at first sight is rewarded. And it is institutionalized.
As if the jury, after consulting the regulations, looked up and said: “this one,” instantly. The president was Lorenzo Ramaciotti, who has seen enough lines (he designed half of the Ferraris and cars present at Passione Engadina) not to have to invent them anymore for a living, said that this car “made the history of the supercar” and is “the symbol of Maserati’s rebirth.” The idea of the famous designer is that every now and then something beautiful still comes out of our workshops, and that something must immediately become history, otherwise it risks remaining just an object. History reassures.
Next to the first series appeared the MCPURA, which Maserati calls “contemporary evolution.” Here the vocation is mechanical purity, character, emotional impact. The dialogue between the first and second generation is the dialogue we like the most. But at Passione Engadina there were also the others, icons of the house: the 3500 GT spider and coupé, the Indy, the Gran Turismo. They paraded on the alpine roads with the dignity of those who have already won the only race that counts, the one against oblivion. They carry more than seventy years of elegance, and elegance really matters a lot.
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This year’s edition of Passione Engadina was called “The Italian Job.” An English title for an Italian party in Switzerland: in short, the summary of the whole story. The original film was a theft. This is a pilgrimage. The bodies are carried in procession as saints were once carried, with the difference that saints did not go three hundred an hour and did not need the concours d’elegance. But the faith is the same.
Italy, struggling to keep schools, highways, and railways standing, still manages to produce an object capable of making a top-class designer say: love at first sight. It is not little. It is actually a lot, if one accepts the idea that beauty remains one of the few things that work. The award, strictly speaking, did not go only to an MC20. It went to an ancient Italian habit: falling in love with a line and mistaking that love for destiny. It works with cars, with squares, with certain songs, with certain people. Then life goes on, the Spluga pass returns to being a road, St. Moritz returns to being a super exclusive place, and the rebirth of a car brand — a weighty word — returns to being what it has always been: an orange car parked in front of logs with the doors raised, admired by people who, for a few hours, had a reason to look at it.
