Sixty years of Ferrari, perhaps the most prestigious of all Italian automotive marques, also means six decades of the world’s greatest style – Italian style, in which history and evolution come together.
The prancing horse has almost always gone hand in hand with Pininfarina in a practically exclusive partnership beginning in 1952, which has lasted through the tenure of each successive managerial generation, from Battista “Pinin” Farina and Sergio Pininfarina to Andrea Pininfarina.
Under the creative influence of its successive stylists, Franco Martinengo, Leonardo Fioravanti and Lorenzo Ramaciotti, however, many of the greatest names in Italian style – Touring, Vignale, Stabilimenti Farina, Bertone, Ghia, Zagato, Scaglietti, Allemano, Boano and Ellena – have clad the sports chassis from Maranello, especially during the early years, and every single one of these has earned a rightful place in this enthralling history.
But, these creations differ widely from one to the next, and do not truly represent the evolution of the marque and its style. The cars that can be seen to fully express the spirit of Ferrari, from an aesthetic point of view, are those by Pininfarina.
Sixty years – when the first Ferrari, the 125 S, took shape in 1947, perhaps even Enzo Ferrari himself could not have imagined just how much his cars were destined to achieve – and not just in the world of motorsports.
And yet it all happened very quickly – just a few short years after the marque’s inception, its racing victories were matched by the success of its production models, which, at first were defined by a style very closely related to Ferrari’s racing image.
As Fioravanti recalls: “The earliest Ferraris were a very mild evolution of their racing cars, and were neither particularly beautiful nor interesting, with the most distinctive feature being that strange, square mouth.”
The article continues in Auto & Design no. 166
