The resounding result at the French Grand Prix held in Lyon on 3 August 1924 and won by Giuseppe Campari was only the beginning of the great Alfa Romeo legend. A new triumph awaited the P2s on October 19, in Monza, at the Italian Grand Prix which, although postponed for a month due to a […]
… and to think that they were called P2 1925. L’ALFA – Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili – a young Milanese carmaker born from the bankrupt French Darracq, was gaining greater and greater recognition thanks to extraordinary victories in the world of racing. They were heroic times, made of amazing discoveries and great exploits also due […]
Gabriele D’Annunzio, Alcyone, 1902 and inscription at the base of the Coppa dell’Oltranza. “Zang tumb tumb … words in freedom”! As Filippo Maria Tommaso Marinetti and all the Futurist Group of a hundred years ago declaimed with enthusiasm and eagerness, worshippers of a new fascinating divinity: speed, but what would they say today in front […]
I went to Libya several times, but the first time was in the late seventies. King Idris Al Senussi, dethroned by a coup d’état of Captain Gaddafi about ten years earlier, was living in exile in Cairo, the Italians were driven away and the country was in a rather delicate social and political status. But […]
18 July 1935 Despite the weather, the rain and the grey skies – almost as a bad omen – were the backdrop of the upcoming German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring. More than 300,000 spectators and the highest authorities of the Reich, including the Führer, crowded the grandstands and edges of the racetrack under thousands […]
I travelled here and there; sette paia di scarpe ho consumate, di tutto ferro per voi ritrovare (Carducci, “I Cipressi”). Yes, I traveled all over and searched here and there; among an infinite number of shops and Brocante wineries everywhere, amid dust and dirt, risking all sorts of infection more than flea bites; I searched […]
Ah! … randomly looking at old photographs. Sometimes, in a moment, you find yourself in a past that was not forgotten, but set aside and far away, yet able to awaken smiles and enthusiasm again. Thirty-four years have passed, I just counted them. One morning, Mimmo Magro, a dear friend who was then Director of […]
The watercolour paintings of Roesler Franz tell the story of a nineteenth-century Rome, ancient, romantic and certainly disappeared, “memories of a passing era”, evidence of what it “was” and that preceded the great radical changes imposed by a new urban structure, rational, social and modern. In 1870, in addition to Raffaele Cadorna’s Bersaglieri and Second […]
In the fifties, the world was re-emerging from the senseless and horrendous conflict that almost destroyed it and life resumed with enthusiasm but above all with tenacity and will not only thanks to the Marshall Plan but also to regained freedom and renewed optimism. Construction sites in Italy popped up everywhere. The bulldozers worked day […]
About 40 years ago, in the middle of the Tuscan countryside near Montalcino, the birth-town of the magnificent Brunello wine, I ended up by chance in a cave of sorts with a sign in front that said “workshop”. Inside, in the midst of filth, there was a little bit of everything: a disassembled old tractor, […]