Le Casse gives the viewer all those things and more! Omar Sharif behind the wheel of that all-time great high-speed chase vehicle- the Opel Rekord- and Jean-Paul Balmondo trying to escape him in his screamin' Fiat 124. You may have to suspend your disbelief a touch, as that 124's rear suspension manages to survive a dozen or so death-blow curb impacts, but that's what movies are all about! Thanks to Stefan for the tip.

What really happened was—well, nobody knows. This photo was posted on A Time To Get, along with a number of similar ones, and the only explanation is this:

A couple highlight pics from the trip just because. What better way to get down on a Monday than with some beat-up old hood badges of multi-million dollar rides and a little reckless driving on the Autostrada?

What’s beyond certain is that Nick Maggio had a killer time.

Photo Credit: A Time To Get

Click next to see our ten favorite international drives from the list, in no particular order. For the rest of the Drives of a Lifetime check out the full National Geographic list.

Photo Credit: Kloppster

Country: Italy
Where: Amalfi Coast
Why: Beautiful coastline, towering bluffs, and bella donnas make this one of the best drives along the Mediterranean.

Photo Credit: artemanuele

Country: Canada
Where: Cabot Trail, Nova Scotia
Why: This 185-mile loop around part of the island shows off a verdant, unmarred coast filled with wildlife and blessed with cool climate year-round.

Photo Credit: Jim Dollar

Country: England
Where: The Cornwall Coast
Why: Celtic ruins, narrow roads, crashing waves, and the odd Cornish beauty conspire to make this one of the best drives in Western Europe.

Photo Credit: Cosygreeneyes

Country: Netherlands
Where: Bollenstreek Route
Why: The Bollenstreek Route, a.k.a. The Flower Route, gets its name from the miles of road cutting a path through acres and acres of tulip fields. Explosions of color fill the eye, making this a perfect spring journey.

Photo Credit:

Country: Canada
Where: Manitoba Prairies
Why: Not for the agoraphobic, this seemingly endless expanse of farmland and prairie opens the mind and evokes the spirit of life before the Internet.

Photo Credit: GarySimmons

Country: United States
Where: Hana Highway, Hawaii
Why: Gorgeous black-sand beaches, tropical greenery, and water everywhere — this is why people cross thousands of miles of empty Pacific to visit a spec of volcanic rock. Nearly 600 curves and 59 bridges don't hurt either.

Photo Credit:

Country: France
Where: Provence
Why: Ever dream of crossing a quiet countryside in a Citroen SM, then pulling into a little bistro for a glass of the local vintner's craft in the company of a stunning brunette mademoiselle? You were picturing Provence.

Photo Credit: Doozzle

Country: Jamaica
Where: The Pirate Route (Port Royal to Kingston)
Why: The island nation is small enough to cross in a day, and in crossing it you'll see beautiful coastline, small hillside villages, and the City of Kingston.

Photo Credit: Teepi

Country: New Zealand
Where: Lord of the Rings Route, North Island
Why: Whether you're a fan of the movie trilogy or not, New Zealand feels like Middle Earth. And to quote Flight Of The Conchords: "New Zealand: Rocks!!!"

Photo Credit: Man's Pic

Country: Canada
Where: Montreal, Area Loop Drive
Why: They can't all be coastlines, can they? From the urban heart of Montreal outwards toward wine country, this is a varied drive so wonderful Alfa Romeo named a car after it.

Photo Credit: Vox Photo

Just click on any of the thumbnails below to jump to the original post about that car.

1937 Beardmore	1953 Citroën	1956 Morris	1959 Morris
1960 Peugeot	1960 Triumph	1961 Morris	1963 Land Rover
1965 Austin	1965 Alfa Romeo	1966 Jaguar	1966 Lancia
1966 Volvo	1969 MG	1969 Volvo	1969 Volvo
1969 Citroën	1970 Volvo	1971 Volvo	1971 MG
1972 Triumph	1972 Steyr	1973 Volvo	1973 MG
1974 Jensen-Healey	1975 Citroën	1975 MG	1977 Fiat
1977 Volvo	1978 Jaguar	1978 Saab	1980 Volvo
1981 Fiat	1982 Fiat	1984 Jaguar	1985 Alfa Romeo
1985 Saab	1985 Peugeot	1986 Jaguar	1988 Renault
1988 Peugeot	1989 Ferrari	1989 Alfa Romeo	1991 Peugeot
1991 Alfa Romeo	1991 Rolls-Royce

We're obviously big fans of the GEM, a nice alternative for areas where a golf cart would look out-of-place and a car isn't ideal. The concept of a FIAT-branded one, a possible result of the FIAT/Chrysler merger, is also interesting. But it just seems so unstatesmanlike compared to Cadillac One.

Beats the hell out of trying to run next to a freaking Cadillac.

She's hoping to speed away from any surprise backrubs.

Smile for the cameras Colonol Gaddafi.

Oh, Sarkozy could make anything look stylish.

This may be one of the few Chrysler products FIAT is going to want to brand for itself.

Photos by Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Reader bzr had this to say about my virulent dislike of the Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione:

I still believe the 8C is the most beautiful car ever built, period. Not most beautiful NEW car, but the most beautiful in all 120 years of motoring. You can show me a picture of a Miura and try to make me eat my words, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Here's one that'll make you ready your cutlery as I tell you how I popped my Miura cherry.

I was deathly afraid as I approached the car on a muggy April day in Italy. I had been a car nerd for years. I had just seen Ralph Lauren’s Mercedes-Benz “Count Trossi” SSK the previous day. And a Ferrari 121 LM Scaglietti Spyder race car parked casually in front of a general store, the very car Eugenio Castellotti had raced in 1955 in Le Mans. Yet the Miura remained my Eldorado, the lynchpin of my geeky heart, and I bet Captain Ahab was in no hurry to meet Moby Dick either. Obsessions are best left for the mind.

What if I see it and it proves to be just another old sports car? I already knew about its deep flaws. Hot, noisy and uncomfortable, with the fuel tank sitting above the front axle so steering precision went out the door as you used up the gas. The racing Weber carburetors mounted on the V12 had a tendency to catch fire. And so on.

I inch my way toward a wall with the Miura’s butt sticking out from the other side and my friend Larry says: “There’s your Miura.”

You all know how this car came to be. How a spited tractormaker set up shop near Enzo Ferrari’s factory. How he hired the engineers Ferrari had fired and how Giotto Bizzarrini, one of those engineers, designed the Lamborghini V12 still in use today. Ferruccio Lamborghini paid him by the horsepower, gently scolding him when his first engine prototype produced all of those HP at a dentist’s drill of 11,000 RPM. He was not out to make a racing car.

What made the Miura revolutionary was, of course, its mid-engined layout, which was finally becoming standard on racing cars. But apart from Alejandro de Tomaso’s cute fiberglass Vallelunga, no one had attempted to use the design on a road car.

The advantages of the layout on a racetrack result from classical mechanics. Watch what happens when you sling a front-engined car into a corner too fast!

Why is the bunny in peril? The speed and ease with which a car can change direction while moving in a curve is related to its moment of inertia. Having weighty components on the extremities, like a heavy engine up front, will increase that value.

What this means is that a car built like that will try to exit the curve along a tangent, as that Ferrari 250 GTO did in the video. Let’s freeze a frame to see its intended versus its actual motion:

If you want track bunnies to survive, you want to place the engine as close as possible to the axis of the car around which it turns. This will lessen its moment of inertia. A field of happy bunnies will greet your design:

In the hands of a skilled driver, a front-engined car will also stay on the road, but its cornering speed will be lower than that of a mid-engined car with similar power and similar weight. This is why all major races from Formula 1 through the Indianapolis 500 to Le Mans have been won by mid-engined cars since the mid-60s.

Why does all this apply to the Miura, a road car? On the road, a mid-engined design offers no distinct advantages. For one, you don’t really come into close contact with your car’s moment of inertia in city traffic. Having the engine behind the driver’s compartment also comes with a number of issues: it kills passenger and trunk space, introduces cooling problems, and makes engine access a major pain.

But the most baffling aspect is that mid-engined cars are not very pretty. Your classic front-engined coupé is the body type most pleasing to the human eye when it comes to interpreting automobile shapes. The Pagani Zonda is certainly a gorgeous fighter jet with magnesium wheels, but understanding its beauty requires careful study and a lot of effort. The pulchritude of a Ferrari 250 GTO, on the other hand, is well within the congitive range of the Jerusalem artichoke, a species of sunflower not known for its mental acumen.

Even though Lamborghini had set out to create a road car which was faster through curves than other cars, he must have been fully aware that he was in the supercar business. And in the supercar business, you sell sex appeal. Your customers will like knowing about your advanced design but they will never use it to its full potential. What they will use is the looks.

I mull over all this with trepidation as I finally round the wall and come face to face with the Lamborghini Miura for the first time. And boy, does it have the looks! Expecting disappointment and a major dose of post-rapture alienation, I fall instead in love for real. It is very pretty in a wholly automotive way.

But how can it be mid-engined and pretty at the same time?

The Miura is a big car, much bigger than you’d expect from photos, and that hood which houses nothing but a spare tire goes on for miles. It sits impossibly low and very wide. When you peek inside, you get the same sense of exhilirating discomfort as you get with the 33 Stradale. Only this time, there are 12 instead of 8 velocity stacks to chomp on loose hair and babies. And then the car ends in a swift swoop.

Parked in front of the Miura is a Ferrari 599 GTB. It is the bigger car and it sits higher too, an exceptionally well-proportioned grand tourer. And as I look at the Ferrari and look back at the Miura, it dawns on me: these two are the same car.

The Miura deceives you to think it’s front-engined!

It shares with the 599 the same profile, the same curves, the same sense of harmony. The Miura is beautiful because it is disguised as a front-engined berlinetta. The incredibly long nose, the transversely mounted V12? They are there to tug you gently into the future of supercar design. Remember, this is 1965. Humans have yet to see the dark side of the Moon.

The Miura has to work very hard for its beauty. It needs to deceive the eye from every angle. One wrong curve and the suspension of disbelief is gone. But no matter where you look, it never is.

Beauty, indeed, in the eye of the deceived beholder.

Photo Credit for Ferrari 250 GTO: exfordy

József Erdősi was an exchange student at the University of Bologna, following in the footsteps of Dante Alighieri and Nicolaus Copernicus. Unlike the millennium-old university’s famous earlier alumni, he was not studying to be a poet or an astronomer: József’s future lay in agricultural engineering. He spent some of his practice time at Lamborghini Trattori, the tractormaking giant founded in post-war Italy by the man who would go on to give Enzo Ferrari bad dreams.

Through the right connections with the right people, József was allowed to transfer for a few weeks to Lamborghini’s other factory—Automobili Lamborghini—in the village of Sant’Agata Bolognese, a hamlet in Emilia-Romagna province between Bologna and Modena. It was here that Ferruccio Lamborghini had founded his sports car manufacture in 1963 to take on Ferrari in neighboring Maranello.

As an engineering student, József spent his days in the brake and engine assembly areas. He was also granted access to the room where Miuras received their scheduled maintenance.

It was not all work and no play for Mr. Erdősi. One day, an enigmatic question came his way about his cardiovascular health. Upon replying in the positive, he found out what it was all about. The young future engineer was about to receive a ride in the fastest road car of its day: a Lamborghini Miura.

“The seat was extremely low. I buckled up with a four-point racing harness. Then, as we rolled out of the factory, the test driver floored it. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. He switched to second gear at 90 MPH, third gear at 125 MPH, fourth at 140 MPH and went all the way to fifth gear at an astonishing 160 MPH,” he recalled in a recent conversation. “A field then approached at great speed. I was bracing myself for the inevitable ride through rows of corn when the driver flicked the wheel and took a corner at an unlikely speed. This went on for another forty minutes.”

By József’s recollections, the test driver he rode with that day had been the racing mechanic for Lorenzo Bandini—Ferrari’s Formula One and sports car driver—until Bandini’s fiery demise at the 1967 Monaco Grand Prix.

An avid photographer, József took a number of pictures on black and white Ilford film. His photos offer a unique glimpse into a nascent Lamborghini factory in its 60s heydays. Four years later, Ferruccio Lamborghini would be gone as the factory’s owner and car manufacturers everywhere would be face to face with the incompatibility of monster V12’s with the 1973 oil crisis.

Lamborghini would survive this all in the coming decades until it came to rest as a subsidiary of a German giant, producing fabulous modern cars in a brand-new Audi-built factory on the same spot.

The Miura production line in all its high-tech 1969 glory.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

Parallel to the Miura was built the four-seater Espada, both Marcello Gandini designs using the same 4-liter Giotto Bizzarrini V12 engine.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

Another shot of the Espada line shows a distinct Espada feature: the huge pane of glass on the rear hatch.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

This is a Miura S in for regular checkup. It had been shipped to Italy from California.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

A Miura being serviced, with the engine cover taken clear off.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

A finished Espada with old-school Italian license plates. In the background, you can see the open door of a Miura, which, when viewed from front, resembles a bull’s horn.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

A Lamborghini V12 engine on the test bench, with twelve polished velocity trumpets capping its Webers.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

Another shot of the V12 in the test chamber.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

This is a complete engine-transmission assembly. You can see from its longitudinal setup that it’s meant for the Espada: in the Miura, the same engine is mounted transversely behind the cabin.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

A Miura stripped down to the bare chassis as it is being serviced. For the sake of everyday usability, the velocity trumpets are replaced with common air boxes.

Photo Credit: József Erdősi

That’s ape as in Italian for honeybee, so think Apis mellifera instead of the superfamily Hominoidea and pronounce it ah-PEH. And don’t look for a V8 engine: the one in the Ape has a single cylinder of 3 (three) cubic inches. Upgrades are available which up that to a whopping fifteen, good for high-speed pizza deliveries followed by burnouts in the piazza.

The Ape you see here is from 1969. Its current owner purchased it in Naples, where it was used to deliver salami and cheese, just as intended. And like every proper Italian machine which stirs the heart, this one is mid-engined. So mid-engined, in fact, that all three cubic inches of that rat-tat-tat two-stroke little wonder are right beneath the bench you sit on. Flip it up and you can get your fingers dirty right away.

By the time this Ape was manufactured in 1969, the design was already two decades old. Similar to every tiny post-war European vehicle, it was borne out of necessity and poverty: another cheap, no-frills construction to get the economic heart of Europe pumping. The idea was Corradino D’Ascanio’s, the man who’s had a hand in everything from the Vespa to the Lambretta to the Agusta helicopter. In fact, the Ape is nothing but a Vespa with two rear wheels and a cabin.

They are clearly workhorse machines, a bit rough in places, but this cappuccino-colored panel van transcends its utilitarian roots to become a three-wheeled cube of desire. Both the size and the dimensions hit the cuteness receptor in the human brain with a mighty thud. Kids, as you can see, cannot resist at all.

The Ape is probably as alien a solution to the American idea of trucking as the occasional Ford F-250 is to a European inner city. But for its natural environment, the Ape is as close to perfection as it gets. Plus, it’s a motor scooter in the eyes of the law! You can park it wherever you wish—for free. And absolutely nothing beats that in a car-choked city center.

Special thanks to Misi Szilágyi of Stipistop for loaning us his Ape. Photography by Natalie Polgar and the author. And if you really need to know: that statue of a pair of mosquito-mayfly hybrids in the pictures is located in a playground on the Vérmező in Budapest, which translates to: The Field of Blood. It was named so after Hungarian revolutionary Ignác Martinovics and his men were beheaded there on May 20, 1795.

Springtime created this for a design competition part of the festival, titled Duepercinque. Meaning “two by five”, it refers to the dimensions in meters of a parking spot (6.5'×16.4'). The idea is to reclaim the area of the spot and “return it to the public domain in a "positive way." Yes, come the Mediterranean summer and you will positively fry your ass on that duepercinque patch of blacktop.

Via Yanko Design.

Photo Credit: exfordy/Flickr (Countach), Marcin Zieliński/Wikipedia (Ikarus). Pattern Recognition: Máté Petrány

Eight hundred miles in the dark, four hundred milligrams of caffeine consumed from cans and ceramic cups and there it is: Lake Como. The road approaches from the top of the steep hills which flank its five cubic miles of frigid slate-gray water. We descend toward the city of Como then on to Cernobbio, home of the Villa d’Este, a magnificent lakeside hotel built half a millennium ago and for a day every late April, home to a handful of the world’s most beautiful cars ever built.

I can feel the small white rocks through the thin Kevlar soles of my sneakers. If you focus your eyes to ground level, a honeycomb pattern emerges, cast by the grille of a red coupé. On this very spot two years ago stood another red coupé, designed by the same man, who is now showing me secret archways of aerodynamics. The car is, of course, Jason Castriota’s Stile Bertone Mantide and this is the Concorso d’Eleganza, a show to fry every brain even vaguely interested in cars.

Classic cars, you say? Then what is Castriota’s new concept, unveiled a week ago, doing here? The Concorso was first held in 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression, as a beauty contest—for the most beautiful new cars. It certainly is the perfect geological backdrop for automotive beauty, a stone’s throw from the villa where Anakin Skywalker wed Padmé Amidala, and this will be the very last Darth Vader reference in this blogpost. The Concorso soldiered on through the Depression until World War Two, then was briefly relaunched only to die a quick death and remain in a coma until BMW resurrected it ten years ago. It is now the premium event on the European concourse circuit.

There is a tendency among petrolheads to arrive at the cars of the 50s and the 60s as the most perfect embodiment of the automotive form. It certainly is easy to see why. Prior to World War Two, the car was a luxury good, clearly evidenced by the prewar cars which make up three classes of the Concorso. These are mostly huge, baroque battleships and visually, they have more to do with horse-driven carriages than with the vehicles we think of as cars. It is very pleasing to look at, say, a 1936 Auburn, but it would be more at home on the waters of Lake Como as a hydrofoil boat than on the public road.

Something happened during the production lull which was World War Two. The cars that emerged in the 50s were smaller, more human in scale, and much closer mechanically to modern cars. To look at a Ferrari 250 GT is to look at a fairly modern sports coupé.

There is a particular 250 GT on display, a Lusso, the last model in Ferrari’s labyrinthine first production model, and this car is chestnut brown and was owned by Steve McQueen. It is deeply beautiful and next to it stand a 250 GT SWB, a Lamborghini Miura, Paul Frère’s old Maserati, and so on. Most of these cars were closely related to motor racing, a pioneering and highly dangerous— therefore very cool—activity back then. They also happen to be really pretty.

But their prettyness stems not from the fact that they are old, au contraire, they are pretty because they were radically new for their day. The Miura was one of the first road cars to have its engine midships. The Ferrari 250 GT SWB was perhaps the best road racing car of its day. The Jaguar D-Type had disc brakes.

These were cars made by people who believed in progress.

This is why it’s wrong to treat them as anything other than fine museum pieces and why it’s so refreshing to see new concepts make up a separate class at the Concorso. Concepts which may be very abstract exercises in design, never making it into production, but concepts which may introduce new ideas. Like the many trick wings on the Bertone Mantide.

What is the point of it all? It’s hard to tell. There are people here who collect cars the way they collect wristwatches and vacation homes and then there are car geeks with mischievous twinkles in their eyes, people like you and I who happen to be wealthy enough to own an interesting old car and it is their cars which bear evidence to daily driving.

But make no mistake: this is a beauty contest. A day of fine escapism, and while there are new cars on display, the answer to the future of the automobile will not emerge from here. However space age the looks, the Corvette ZR1-based Mantide will not be an answer to a world running out of space and oil and filling with people who have never owned a car but would certainly like to do so.

Perhaps the best way to approach it is as a game. Dress up in a fine spring suit, grab a glass of champagne, and enjoy the Alpine sun as you walk around the mammoth sycamore by the hotel and lean in close to the leather straps which hold engine covers above triple Webers. Tomorrow will be another day. But if you lean in close enough, you can just about hear a racing V12 scream down the Mulsanne straight at Le Mans.

Just make sure you step back when the car’s owner guns the engine for real. These things are LOUD.

Next up, we’ll look at the more interesting cars of the Concorso in detail. Like this 1938 Alfa Romeo 8C 2900B pictured above, which won this year’s Coppa d’Oro: the grand prize of the event.

Photo Credit: Natalie Polgar and the author

As you’re reading this, Jalopnik’s European squad—yours truly, teamed up with Crazy Euro Car Girl—are heading down to Italy to arrive on Saturday morning for this year’s Concorso d’Eleganza. It’s the 80th showing of perhaps the classiest classic car event this side of Pebble Beach and on display will be a number or rather special cars. Racing Ferraris, prewar Bugattis and even Jason Castriota’s new Bertone Mantide. Only this time it's the real thing instead of the foam model on display at the Shanghai Auto Show.

The Concorso is a peculiar event for the car geek. For one, it is of a mind-boggling scale. There are close to a hundred cars on display, every single one of them not only very beautiful, old and exciting, but often with an intriguing story. Ferraris driven by 50s playboys. Maseratis owned by movie stars. An Alfa Romeo used by Benito Mussolini’s mistress Clara Petacci to escape at the end of World War Two, unsuccessfully. And so on. It is a monster of a show, easily inducing Stendhal syndrome in those so inclined.

On the other hand, the Concorso brings into sharp focus the oddity of the vintage car scene. There is a tendency among people who are into cars—and I am certainly not immune to this—to think that all the best cars, be they road cars or racers, were produced in the 50s and the 60s. And in that regard, the Concorso should be the pilgrimage of a lifetime.

Except that the old Ferraris are no longer raced by Italian daredevils on public roads. They are tended to by retired American businessmen in ice-cream colored polo shirts. The paintjobs, never meant to be immaculate, are given lustruous sheens with soft clothes and have their names pronounced in accented Italian.

And that the glamour of all these cars stems from the fact that they were radically new back in the day, not museum pieces.

I first came face to face with the Concorso two years ago, and ten days later, produced what was perhaps the most difficult article I’ve ever written, which is now republished in English at Hyperleggera:

Sergio Scaglietti is a short Italian gentleman. Immaculate in appearance, but that’s Italian DNA, his hands sinewy, his eyes like the lake. All around us park Ferraris which Scaglietti had designed fifty year ago. Cherry blossoms captured as they reached the ground, a half century old yet gleaming, all proper use carefully polished away.

Take the red 121 LM Spider we had passed on our way to the hotel. Eugenio Castellotti led with it the race at Le Mans in 1955 before the world erupted into flaming magnesium. The red 860 Monza. Juan Manuel Fangio drove it to victory in Sebring in 1956.

Under the paintjobs, covering aluminum curves, are Sergio Scaglietti’s fingerprints. They’re from an age when the right materials, the right technology and the right people combined to create perfection, time after time after time. Florence under the Medicis was similar. Athens under Pericles.

Modena in the Fifties and the Sixties.

If you’re in the Lake Como area, you can attend the Concorso yourself on its public day of Sunday for €10. If not, check back here on Monday, when, armed with hundreds of photos, we’ll show you what’s hot and what’s not.

The MC12 hugs the tarmac like a wicked ocean predator, a flat hulking mass which eats giant squids for breakfast and orcas for snacks. It reaches all the way up to my knees and I’d love to say that I immediately see something is amiss but I do not. A twelve hour drive across the Alps and a mad dash down a twisting road has left me exhausted and this is the first MC12 I have ever seen.

I was of course expecting endurance racer looks but that diffuser could serve as the blades to a combined harvester and the rear wing looks big enough to lift a C–130. Also, I have trouble fitting my pinky finger between the car and the road. This is a race car.

You’re thinking MC12 Corsa, correct? The Maserati twin to the Ferrari FXX which sold for a cool million bucks and—like the FXX—was not a car you could actually pick up and drive home but which you adopted like a zoo animal and drove at Maserati trackdays. Yeah, but the Corsa is not street legal, so why should it be equipped with license plates? Well, plate in the singular, no way would one fit on the grille without messing with the airflow, but still.

“Hello, so what’s the deal with this car? Corsa looks and a license plate?” I ask the owner apparent, who shall remain nameless, not because of discretion but through sheer forgetfulness on my part. Let’s call him Karl!

“Oh, it’s definitely a Corsa,” Karl says.

“Yeah, but you can’t drive a Corsa on the street,” I say.

“It can be arranged,” Karl responds.

Rules, shmules! I have one last question, to which he responds:

“I took it to 223 MPH last week at the Nardò Ring. But you know how it is! You always want to go faster, faster, faster.”

He then settles into a lawn chair and lights a Marlboro. It is a spring day in Italy, after all, and well past lunchtime.

Photo Credit: Larry Parker and the author

It took until last fall for Google Street View to make it across the Atlantic, a year and a half after it debuted in the US. Both roads and privacy laws are narrower here. This must have figured in the delay, but the age of Peeping Toms is now upon us. And there certainly are other things to explore than the digitally blurred faces of Italian politicians on campaign posters around the Duomo in Milan.

Some of our roads are so narrow that even seated in a Hot Wheel of a local supermini the idea of traffic coming the opposite way is enough to fill you with dread. Convex mirrors to the rescue! You can find them in most intersection, like here in the village of Cernobbio in North Italy:

Look closer and you can see the Street View car itself reflected, with its scaffolding of camera equipment balanced on top. It is a black Opel Astra, which translates to Saturn ~ in the American language.

But look even closer, move along the road, and grind your teeth in frustration at the missed opportunity. This mirror happens to be mounted at the entrance of Villa d’Este, a magnificent estate on Lake Como, site of the annual Concorso d’Eleganza. The public road Via Regina passes right next to the Villa, at one point crossing beneath in a short tunnel, and when the Concorso is on in late April, you can stop at various observation points and drool at all the cars. Since this is Italy, you can do this in the close proximity of excellent food, so that all the Maserati-induced saliva will not go to waste and will help bits of mozzarella di bufala become parts of your body.

Should you find yourself in the area this year, do swing by on the weekend of April 25-26. It’s only 15 Euro-bucks to get in and you can liquefy your brain on cars faster than it takes a Ferrari Colombo engine to rev into the high latitudes.

If you happen to arrive at the right time, you can even catch a glimpse of ladies in decadent dress, idling by a Bugatti Type 57C Voll & Ruhrbeck. As if waiting for this 1939 cabriolet to set sail not for Lake Como, but for the Southern Ocean itself.

First, we should all thank Scroggzilla for unearthing these videos of a vintage Castrol documentary for us (and Targa-Florio.net for providing the photograph above). The Targa Florio was an endurance race held in the mountains of Sicily; starting in 1906, it was finally discontinued in 1977 for safety reasons. Yes, even by the insanely loose (and relatively lawsuit-free) standards of European road racing, the Targa Florio was considered too dangerous to continue. We've got the whole lineup of worship-deserving machinery here, including MGs, Austin-Healeys, Alfas, Porsches, and- of course- Ferraris.

While not as quick as its Alfetta stablemate, the Mille Miglia car still came in a bragging-rights-enabled 35th place. We need more Alfas in this race!


After retiring their hopelessly battered Alfetta, the California Mille crew came storming back with this replacement. Chief Perp Lamm came pretty close to exercising his right to claim any car for $500 when he saw the Webers on this thing, but decided to let it race instead. 24th place, which should disprove those "unreliable Alfa" stereotypes, right?


Even with an all-night wrenchathon mixed in, this car did way better than I ever imagined possible. The Stallions' all-woman crew kept this fine sports car going for most of the weekend, grabbing 47th place and a great 1:39.258 best lap time. Pay attention, future racers: the X1/9 has what it takes for LeMons… and you can get one for cheap!


This thing is a genuine LeMons legend. A veteran of every single California LeMons race, it's been a hit at the Concorso Italiano, performed thousands of parking lot donuts, and is even now being prepped for a 200 MPH Bonneville run. It's mighty fast on the racetrack- check out that 1:34.512 best lap time- and this time it had a best-yet 18th-place finish. Sure, they could drop a junkyard Toyota 4A in it and break down less frequently, but that would be wrong!

The early Fiat 124 coupes sure are wonderful machines, but they're rarer than honest politicians in North America. The few that came over here became red powder and wistful memories a couple decades back… except for this one in Oregon (go here if the ad disappears), which is priced so low we dasn't reveal it here, for fear of being deafened by screams of disbelief. This one needs some work, we'll be the first to admit, although the seller has decided to spare us the troublesome details in his description. "Good condition to restore" is all we get, and that should be enough, right? Keep in mind that the seller has "several Fiats," so you might be able to score a package deal involving some extra boxes of broken useful parts.

The best car deals may be those in which the seller doesn't even provide the car model in the description; hey, maybe that means he or she has no idea what total jewels they really are! The headline of this listing for a 'fiat sports car (2)' (go here if the ad disappears) doesn't tell us much, but the photo of one car's grille indicates that we seem to be looking at a couple of 1957-60 Fiat 1200 Spiders. Are they complete? Are they rusty? Were they used for AK-47 practice by the Manson Family? Albert, the seller, doesn't say, though he does want us to know that "both have paperwork." Will this be a huge, sanity-destroying project? Of course not! You'll be laughing at those poor Corolla owners as you drive your perfectly restored Spider in a matter of days. Hey, just look at how pretty it will be!

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Pininfarina's death comes at a time when the family-controlled company is in the midst of a crucial restructuring. Last year, Pininfarina's consolidated net loss increased to 114.9 million euros from 21.9 million euros the previous year. Andrea Pininfarina is survived by his wife Cristiana, and two sons and a daughter. We're told the company said it will issue a statement later today. [via Automotive News (sub. req.)]