The winding arc to Ferrari’s Roma coupé
There is no official record of the first sighting of a Ferrari on the bustling streets of post-war Rome, but it is likely to have been early in 1948, around the time Enzo Ferrari received the first customers for his road cars. Right from the start, an unusually powerful mystique surrounded even the act of buying one of the cars bearing the badge of a black horse on a yellow shield. Ferrari didn’t go out seeking clients. They went to him, and not infrequently they were made to wait for an audience with the Pope of Maranello, as he was sometimes called, in reference to the town in Emilia-Romagna where he had set up his business and which he was to make world-famous.
Ferrari designed none of his cars. That was done by the team of technicians he assembled and supervised. “I am not an engineer,” he once said. “I am an agitator of men and machines.” His genius was that of an organiser, not just of a factory building wonderfully exotic cars but also of a racing team subsidised, from its earliest years, through the pioneering use of sponsors to finance his efforts. But he seemed to know beauty when he saw it.
Italy had made desirable cars before the war, but it soon became apparent that a Ferrari was something different, particularly when, in 1948, the team’s cars raced to victory in the Targa Florio and the Mille Miglia, two classic endurance events of the international calendar, run over public roads, over mountain passes and along seafronts. The message was that while a Ferrari was very fast indeed, it was also impressively rugged.
The effect on the socialites and film stars taking a break from work at Cinecittà and lounging in the cafés on the Via Veneto – then approaching its height as the centre of Roman dolce vita – can only be imagined. Perhaps the first Ferrari they saw was the 166MM Barchetta (little boat) sold to Gianni Agnelli, the playboy head of Fiat, its open two-seater bodywork painted in an unusual but very stylish combination of dark blue and dark green. Agnelli’s car – now the property of an English collector – was the double of one that would bring Ferrari even greater international prestige by winning the 24 Hours of Le Mans the following year. Yet he could use it to cruise the boulevards of Turin on his way to and from the Fiat factory, to drive up to the ski resort of Sestriere, which his grandfather had founded in the 1930s, or to head for a rendezvous with his yacht at Ravello, on the Amalfi coast.
Soon queues of the rich and famous were forming outside Ferrari’s door, many of them arriving from Rome. Among the first celebrities to respond to the cars’ special appeal was the film director Roberto Rossellini, who made the pilgrimage in 1949. Following his early successes with Rome, Open City and Paisá, he was working on Stromboli with a new female star, the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman. To the delight – and feigned horror – of the gossip columnists and the genuine horror of the Vatican, Rossellini had left his second wife to take up with Bergman, who had abandoned her Swedish husband and their small daughter to be with him.
Rossellini’s first Ferrari was a 166 Inter, one of three made with cabriolet bodywork by Pininfarina. There would be many others, including a 212 Inter coupé bought for Bergman as a wedding present when they married in 1953, even though she was not keen on fast driving. Enzo Ferrari was happy to be photographed sharing a table with his glamorous customers at a restaurant across the road from his factory.
Rossellini had ambitions to race, and that year he entered the Mille Miglia in his own open-cockpit 212. But after setting out from Brescia, his attempt was halted when he reached the halfway control point in Rome, where Bergman, now the mother of their three children, was waiting. As the car came to a halt, she leaned into the cockpit and begged him not to continue.
In 1954 he bought her another Ferrari: a 375MM coupé with special aerodynamic bodywork, again by Pininfarina. He paid Ferrari $6,000 for the car, first unveiled at that year’s Salon des Automobiles in Paris, stipulating a respray from its original pale blue to a shade of grey-gold that would be named Grigio Ingrid. Even this machine, among the most beautiful Ferraris ever made, failed to arouse her interest, and Rossellini drove it himself for three years before selling it to the first of several American owners, one of them the president of Microsoft.
Ferrari’s Roma, introduced to the public in 2019, can trace its bloodline back to the gorgeous Bergman/Rossellini coupé via the sumptuous race-bred 250GT Lusso of the early 1960s. The Roma has a twin-turbocharged 3.9-litre V8 engine, rather than the Lusso’s 3-litre V12, but it is built to do the same job of providing a stimulating driving experience while conveying its occupants in comfort to their next destination – a villa in the Tuscan hills, perhaps, or a reserved parking space in Monaco’s Casino Square during the Grand Prix weekend.
As it happens, Rome was the location of Ferrari’s first race win, when Franco Cortese drove to victory on a circuit around the Baths of Caracalla in the spring of 1947, only a few weeks after the prototype had been fired up and made its way along the road outside the factory, still lacking bodywork. On 11th May the team travelled to Piacenza, where Cortese was in the lead when the engine developed a misfire that forced him to retire.
A promising failure, Enzo Ferrari called it, and two weeks later the team went south for La Primavera Romana di Motori (the Roman Spring of Motor Cars), a race through the tree-lined roads around the old Roman baths near the city centre. This time Cortese’s car had new full-width bodywork,
and pulled away to win easily. That victory would come to be seen as the forerunner of a record including 241 Grand Prix wins, 16 constructors’ championships, 15 drivers’ titles, 10 wins at Le Mans, including the centenary edition in 2023, and countless other victories around the world over the last 75 years.
Ferrari’s view was that he made road cars in order to subsidise the racing activities that built the legend, offering reflected glory to anyone who could afford it. Production went from 26 cars in 1950 to 306 in 1960, 928 in 1970, 2,470 in 1980 and 4,309 in 1990, after which the fallout from worldwide economic crises depressed the total for a while. But a careful recovery and the exploitation of new markets brought the total up to 6,573 in 2010, and in 2022 the number of Ferraris produced stood at 13,221, many of them finished to custom specifications. In 75 years, then, just over a quarter of a million Ferraris have emerged from the now historic factory beside a road that, if you were to turn left out of the gates, head south and carry straight on for 250 miles, would take you all the way to the city whose name your brand-new Roma so proudly and elegantly bears.
