The Italian Line

The Italians were building fine carriages around 1550, and they still are: Buy a gran turismo automobile today, one of the first rank, a 130-mile-an-hour car, a Ferrari, Corvette, Maserati, AC Cobra, Aston Martin, E-Jaguar, and you'll be buying a body either designed and made in Italy or massively influenced by the Italians. Buy a small car, a Japanese-made Datsun, a German BMW 1800. a British Sunbeam, and the story is the same. The much-admired lines of the Buick Riviera are clearly reflective of the best Italian practice. The Italians are few, in proportion to the weight they bring to bear on the automobile industry: a dozen designing companies, twice that many top-line creative men, a few thousand workers to put the drawings into wood and clay and metal, to shape and give being to "the Italian line."

Like all aesthetic concepts, the Italian line, the Italian idea, is hard to lay down in words, but at the root, in its highest form, it means plain metal, unadorned or very nearly unadorned by brightwork; a smooth, flowing, natural line, an intelligent modification of the fish shape that is nature's solution to the problem of high-speed passage. In the interior, evidence that great care has been taken to provide the driver with comfort, stability and convenience: ideally, a bucket seat that holds him firmly – hip and shoulder – gear lever and steering wheel set for the straight-arm style of driving, instrument panel directly in his gaze, individual gauges canted toward him if need be; in fine, everything placed to give him a long, level look at the road, to keep him in full control, to let him know the subdued and hedonistic wonders of first-cabin private travel.

Italian domination of automobile body design and fabrication as nearly approaches the absolute as does Paris' domination of the haute couture: now and again there is a flurry of activity and a fanfare of trumpetry on behalf of a new couturier in New York or Dublin or wherenot, but in the end it is to Paris that the world turns. Every year or so Detroit or Coventry or Stuttgart will proclaim a revolution, but nearly always it is no revolution, only gimmickery, and the designers and the panel beaters of Milan and Turin press on with their work, unmoved. They are perfectly secure, and they know it.

If success in automobile bodywork could be found in the first instance, and thenceforth maintained, by the creation of beauty of line alone, it would be hard enough to gain; but the Italians cultivate their exotic art in much greater depth than that. In the 1920s and 1930s, the heyday of true custom, one-at-a-time coachwork, general practice was to take a chassis from the car manufacturer, build on it a strong and rigid framework of ash or hickory or some such timber, and lay over that the hand-hammered, hand-filed-and-fitted metal. The end product would be good-looking in proportion to the designer's talent, and as nearly unique as one's purse could manage. It would also be very heavy, as a rule. It had to be, to accept the driving stresses that would be put through it. This kind of carrosserie was best suited to majestic touring cars and sedate, town-bred limousines. It wouldn't do for race cars, for sports cars, for the gran turismo machine intended for a career of mountain storming.

The Italians have (text concluded on page 171)Italian Line(continued from page 76) designed and fabricated, to button over race-car chassis, whole bodies that weighed less than 65 pounds, complete with seats, windshields, rearview mirrors and St. Christopher medals. Long ago, houses like Touring were hammering out coupe and short-sedan bodies that a strong teenager could lift over his head – bodies, what's more, that would stay squeak-and rattle-free indefinitely, because they were designed to do nothing but give the passengers a place to sit out of the wind and the rain: the cars were completely protected from any trace of driving stress. A structure of pencil-thin tubing had been built up on the chassis, and the body panels hand-fitted over this, and at the same time insulated from it. The car might go into and out of foot-deep holes in the road all day, but this adventure could not affect the fit of the doors. Some builders refuse to weld or drill panels to fit them together, contending that both systems are weakening. They fold the ends together and hammer them flat!

The history of Italian coachwork is full of such innovation. Pininfarina was making quad headlights 15 years ago. It is difficult to think of a useful device applicable to bodywork still unexploited by the Italians. Hooded dashboard instruments, red warning lights that go on when the doors are open, rear-window wipers are all ancient notions. The door extending into the roof of a very low car, the pillarless sedan, the pillarless windshield, the faired-over headlights – all are old, well-used Italianate ideas.

Individual custom creation is a rarity today. Even Pininfarina does not care to do more than half a dozen of these a year, and the clients thus favored will be selected with great care. Merely to have the money isn't enough: they must be persons of distinction whose possession of the car will be noted. Heads of state are favored – but not just any states. Most coachbuilders say that it's impossible to charge an individual client more than 25 percent of the real cost of the car; thus each unit represents a 75-percent loss. Custom cars today are made for corporations, used in ways that allow the tremendous costs involved to be written off: as exhibit cars, as design inspirations, and so on. Some idea of the cost of these items can be formed from the 18 months of work that Ghia put into the Chrysler Norseman, the car that went down with the Andrea Doria.

The category called elaborazione – "elaborations" – occupies much time in the smaller houses, adept at giving a standard car a new look at prices the owners can face without shuddering; but it is the creation of designs for the big manufacturers that returns reputation and profit. The national origin of an automobile gives no real indication of the origin of its body design: German, French, British, Swedish, Japanese cars by the dozen wear Italian. Of cars de signed and built by individual carrozzerie, a production of 30 to 50 a day is thought to be a good many – the biggest, Pininfarina, turned out 14,132 last year – but the total of cars built around the world to Italian design would run into the millions. They may range in price from under $2500 for a VW Karmann-Ghia to over $20,000 for a Ferrari Super America.

There are a dozen Italian designers and coachbuilders famed around the world – Michelotti, Viotti, Scioneri, Savio, Boneschi, Moretti, besides Ghia, Vignale, Touring and the rest – but it is Battista Pininfarina who means the most. His name was changed in 1961 with the warm and paternal consent of the Italian government: "The President of the Republic ... in consideration of the high social and industrial merits of Battista (Pinin) Farina, has entitled him to take the surname 'Pininfarina,' this being the prestigious name of the industry created by him, well known and appreciated in Italy and throughout the rest of the world." Battista Pininfarina is today laden with honors, friend of presidents and kings, member of the Royal Academy of Arts. He has retired from the active direction of his firm – his son, Sergio, and his son-in-law, Renzo Carli, are in charge, but his stamp is large in the history of the automobile. Among a score of his works which may be cited, there is his 1951 Cisitalia, chosen to represent the best of all post-War designs in the now-legendary Museum of Modern Art show.

It was Pininfarina who formulated the law that a motorcar body should have, first, elegance of line, second, comfort, and third, good penetration – an efficient aerodynamic shape. Almost anyone can create a car body (and before and just after the last war, almost anyone did) that will be striking-looking at first glance (but not five years afterward), and perfectly comfortable for a bald man five feet tall. To evolve a body that is permanently beautiful, comfortable, and that will of itself add ten miles an hour to the speed of the chassis it is given – this is something else again.

Pininfarina has stated the matter succinctly: "The interrelation between the body of a beautiful woman and that of a Farina-designed car is that both have simplicity and harmony of line, so that when they are old one can still see how beautiful they were when they were young."