Italy’s automotive artistry now has an exclusive gallery, thanks to a new concours debuting in the Eternal City.
It’s hard to separate the bravura design of the best Italian cars from their other dazzling qualities: intricate engineering, benchmark performance and lithe handling—all usually packaged under an extremely desirable badge. But as a producer of automotive art for art’s sake, Italy has no equal.
It’s partly down to the nation’s innate sprezzatura: it could be argued that most of the populace would no more drive an unattractive car than eat uninspired food. The country also has a unique stylistic ecosystem that generates great design—its rarefied Prancing Horses and Raging Bulls deserve to be clothed in the finest bodywork. From the earliest days of motoring, il bel paese has been home to an array of coachbuilders with names as evocative as the automakers they tailored for. Such bottegas as Bertone, Zagato, Pininfarina and Scaglietti were like those of the great Renaissance painters and sculptors, but in this case, nurturing brilliant young car designers, of which Italy seems to have had more than its fair share.
The concours d’elegance is today’s contemporary showcase for elite vehicles. And while Italy hosts one of the very best and most beautiful at Villa d’Este, on the banks of Lake Como, it doesn’t have as many major judged exhibitions as the US and UK, and certainly none that focus solely on domestic masterworks—until now.
Hotelier and car enthusiast Bill Heinecke plans to be a driver for change in this regard with his new Anantara Concorso Roma, which will take place April 24th through 27th in the heart of its namesake city. Entries will be limited to Italian cars (though Bugatti gets a pass due to its origins), with the gorgeous, double-Le Mans–winning 1963 Ferrari 275 P the first model confirmed to be on display in the gardens of Casina Valadier, the neoclassical villa overlooking the metropolis. Guests will stay at Heinecke’s nearby Anantara Palazzo Naiadi Rome.
The field will feature automobiles of all eras, and judging will be conducted by a distinguished panel led by Adolfo Orsi Jr., a scion of the family that founded Maserati, assisted by experts such as Donald Osborne, a classic-car historian and the former CEO of Audrain Motorsport in the US, and previous Pininfarina and Fiat Group designer Lorenzo Ramaciotti, among others.
The combination of exotic machines and the attractions of Rome in spring is likely to make this new concours a fixture on the global collector-car circuit. Yet we already see room for improvement: as Italy has dressed carmakers from around the world, from Aston Martin to Honda to Volkswagen, perhaps the show should expand to include Italian design in general and not just that of its own marques, thereby celebrating la dolce vita with even greater variety.
