THE OPEN HEARTS FRATERNITY
Poltu Quatu Classic
If you wonder what car to enter into next year’s edition of the Poltu Quatu Classic, here’s my advice. Bring something open. It’s not for showing off. It’s for purely practical reasons. You see, when you receive guidance for parking in San Pantaleo, you will need to be able to hear Simone scream. His voice is very loud. In fact, you can hear his laughter from a mile away, on a quiet night. But when you are surrounded by some fifty revving engines, you may have to climb out through the window of your Ferrari to communicate. But you will probably quickly discover that gestures work much better anyway. Open. Openness. Part of what makes this event what it is all about. Open cars. Open hearts. Open minds.
After the tick-tack-tock of the daily grind, we often come to expect everything to happen in the same grey fashion, as if willingly succumbing to a perfidious kind of Stockholm syndrome. Stuck in a world with predefined patterns. Patterns we are all made to follow. Strict rules and dividing lines. Carefully separating us people on the basis of where we are from, our jobs or our age. Or any other things that make us different in each other’s eyes. Keeping us in boxes and silos, prisoners of the manic pigeonholing process.
Fear not. Escape is at hand. At least for a few days, in the microclimate of the world’s most emotional car event, you can melt down the thick wall of ice that modern society wants you to chill in shape around your heart. It will disappear so fast that you won’t even hear the cracks as that wall crumbles right down, from the very moment you say hello to Simone and his trusted crew of wizards. As you sit down at one of the long tables that welcome you from the very first evening, you begin to realise that you are surrounded by two types of people. Your friends. And those who will soon become your friends. A slice of pizza and a couple of glasses of wine later you open up to your true self. One may say that you become Italian. I would say that you become a better version of yourself. The version I always wanted to be, but that I so rarely get to display. The version that was always there. It just needed to be liberated.
You come to this kind of event to see the cars, but if it’s a good one, you will go away mostly remembering the people. It’s the vibe of those people who inspire the cars, that in turn inspire other people. When you see Fabrizio Giugiaro doing doughnuts in his beloved Nazca, a car that he designed himself exactly 30 years ago, you realize that things have a way of coming full circle. A virtuous circle. Feel good, make others feel good and the world around you will become a better place. It’s easy to dismiss the hippy bus moment, that has become a symbol of the concours, as just a great photo opportunity, with gorgeous models, under the blooming trees, in a picture perfect piazza, with the majestic peaks of the mountains behind them. It surely is a magic moment. But its significance is much deeper. Beauty and conviviality are much treasured here. Our Latin tradition places them at the root of everything, including engineering excellence or mastering racecraft. Maybe this is the reason why Italian cars have something so much more special than the others. Maybe it’s because they are built with so much more emotion. With such limitless passion, you will overcome even the harshest of obstacles.
Obstacles. Sardinia has a few of those. Those mountains are mostly made of crumbling rock, making even what looks like the simplest of climbs next to impossible. Next is the vegetation. I was wary of being bitten by snakes, but the countless spines cut into my flesh well before I even got into potentially snake infested territory. Car photography has a way of connecting you to the landscape, but perhaps I could do without being literally connected to dozens upon dozens of nasty dried out spined bushes that, as Marius put it, plug into you like lightning cables in your iPhone. I don’t really mind the heat and I love the company of tiny lizards that crisscross the heated rocks. After all, their quick changes of direction inspired me to choose my Instagram name.
The sun, on the other hand, is another matter. It was immensely strong. Shooting in intense sunshine is difficult if not impossible. It takes a while for the eye to adjust to the darkness of the viewfinder. I felt like a pirate and it made me giggle. Pirates wore a patch over one eye so that one became accustomed to darkness and the other to bright sunshine, enabling them to fight both below and above deck of the ships without waiting for their vision to adapt to the different lighting conditions. I had to keep my eye in the viewfinder for a couple of minutes before every shot. And you never know when the guys will show up, or how many will take that route. Timetables are only a suggestion in an event that is run with very different priorities. It’s like at a party, you only leave when you feel it’s right, not at a precice time. If it’s fun to stay longer, you stay. If it’s more fun to go elsewhere, you leave earlier. At the Poltu Quatu Classic, this is how the schedule is made. It does not make it easy to cover, from a photographer’s point of view, but I would not have it any other way. So you have to wait for a long time, then be ready for everything to be over in seconds. And when you scream with all your might, frustrated that you missed a shot, at least you know you are unlikely to have disturbed anyone, from your secluded position, perched on top of some treacherous cliffs. It’s an emotional carousel, as Marius says.
Work hard, play hard. I could not think of a better way to experience that idiom. As we partied till sunrise only retiring to bed after Simone cooked us some pasta with his mum’s delicious ragu. On the deck of a gently rocking boat, with a small glass of Prossecco, planning the day that was just starting. After two hours of sleep, we were back at it, fueled by some crazy energy, no doubt at least partly coming from the splendid cars that were in the Concours.
When Simone looked at the entry list for this year, he was horrified to notice that they did not invite a single Alfa, even though we were official media partners. He promptly asked a friend to bring his gorgeous Giulietta Spider at no cost. We are deeply touched by this, but he should not have worried. There is only one thing better than seeing stunning Alfas and that’s meeting passionate Alfisti. Whether they showed up in a Ferrari restomod, a prewar Lancia Astura or in a GFG Style Vision 2030 prototype, to name but a few, the event was naturally teaming with Alfisti. Most importantly for us, it represents the most accomplished real world iteration of what the Alfa attitude is all about. So don’t be surprised to see a Mercedes, a Mustang or a Manx Meyers on Alfattitude, believe us, these drivers truly belong in our group. Or maybe Simone found a way to unite us all in something even bigger, the Poltu Quatu Classic fraternity.
I guess we’ll never know.
