After the plum blossom season ended, the cicadas chirped in the midsummer, and everything seemed to be melting faster. The cold drink I just ordered had a circle of water stains on the bottom of the cup in the blink of an eye.
The Italians have encapsulated this in one word, Culaccino, which is one of the Italian expressions I stumbled upon recently, another being Fare una bella figura, which means to leave a lasting impression.
Italians must have a lot of idol baggage, otherwise they wouldn't have created such an expression. Perhaps that's why Italians always create something that makes people take a second look. Looking at those Miu Miu girls and Ferrari boys, you can roughly understand how much waves Miuccia and Enzo have caused in the hearts of boys and girls.
Lancia Delta 1600GT
Since this is a car channel, we will only talk about the charm of Italian cars. Even people who know nothing about cars can tell how special Italian cars are with their naked eyes. If the license plate of a car is not in the center, it is most likely an Alfa Romeo; if the rear wheel of a car is only exposed by one-third, it is most likely a DS.
When DS was launched in the early 1950s, it was described by structuralist philosopher Roland Barthes as "like a drop from heaven." Although DS is a French car, it was an Italian named Bertoni who gave it such a shape.
However, when evaluating Italian cars, almost everyone will mention a word: sculpture. In an article titled "How Three Italians Born in 1938 Changed Car Design Forever", the author pointed out that a very important factor that influenced the designs of Fioravanti, Giugiaro and Gandini was plaster. While Americans used clay modeling techniques learned from Hollywood movies to make full-size car models, Italians learned from Michelangelo and took up a chisel to chisel out the dream car of a 17-year-old boy on a plaster model.
It is not just tradition. Wang Honghao, an automotive industry observer, believes that "Italians have the strongest shaping ability in the world" because of their geographical location. Carrara, located in Tuscany, Italy, is known as the marble capital of the world and produces the world's most famous marble. "Geography determines talent," he wrote.
It is said that the Italian named Bertoni had been immersed in books about Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci since he was six years old. He became a sculptor and was selected by Citroën to design the car. It was from a piece of plaster that Bertoni carved the shape of DS19 inspired by fish.
Once the charm of Italian cars is explained in words, it becomes boring and mediocre somehow. The charm of Italian cars? Perhaps those who really understand will understand it naturally, and among these people is Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.
"I don't drive a car, and I'm not very interested in cars. ... Driving is very stressful, it costs a lot of money, you can't drink, and it's very troublesome to wash and inspect the car. No matter how you look at it, it's more fun to take the subway or taxi." In a column serialized in Weekly Asahi in 1985, Murakami wrote, "With the increase in cars, it's hard to calm down no matter where you go in Japan. ... Wouldn't it be nice if there was a city in the world without a single car? Just like Wyatt Earp confiscated pistols from people in Dodge City, the staff would store the cars at the city entrance. If there is such a city somewhere, I will definitely live in it."
However, there will always be a time to leave Japan and live somewhere else. Due to various coincidences, Murakami and his wife traveled to Europe and the United States, after all, "places where you can't do anything without a car", and finally had no choice but to take a driver's license at an advanced age and buy a car. But even after getting a driver's license, Murakami said that his thoughts on cars have not changed.
In order to buy a car, Murakami did try out some cars. In "The Ultimately Sad Foreign Language", a collection of essays written by Murakami when he lived in the United States from 1991 to 1993, he commented that "the design of American cars is not to his taste"; "I bought a second-hand Accord in the United States. It doesn't hurt to drive it. This kind of grace is very suitable for driving in the United States, but if you ask me if the Honda Accord is fun to drive, it's not very interesting"; "The BMW 320 is fun but also frustrating." Generally speaking, no matter what he tried or bought in the end, Murakami was not satisfied. Murakami always said, "I hope to have a car that is fun to drive."
Murakami is such a stubborn and picky person, but he has a special liking for equally imperfect Italian cars. In another essay collection, "How Murakami Asahido was Forged", Murakami was frank about the shortcomings of the Lancia Delta 1600GT he bought, saying that it could not drive fast; the strong plastic smell was crazy; it was difficult to shift gears; there was no power steering; the steering wheel was surprisingly heavy, and when parking vertically, he really wanted to entrust it to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
"However, I don't regret buying it as my first car, and I even feel that it is a great fortune," Murakami wrote. As for the reason, one is that its "simple and elegant design is extraordinary at first glance," and the other is because "this car has an expression, or in layman's terms, it is a car that makes people know what it is thinking at a glance. ... Such a car is hard to come by. There are countless good cars in the world, but it is rare to see a car with a lifelike expression."
In fact, in addition to Italian cars, Mercedes-Benz 190 and Toyota Corolla also left a deep impression on Murakami, who doesn't like cars. 190 just doesn't fit in Princeton, where Murakami was living at the time. Murakami described Princeton's temperament as an isolated island in the ocean. People living here ignore the fluidity and sensuality of time and just calmly walk their own way.
Murakami's Princeton faculty housing complex is full of "rusty second-hand Corollas" and "Civic cars without bumpers." By that standard, the Mercedes, like the BMW and Porsche, is too shiny and more suitable for California, and is ubiquitous in Berkeley.
Since expensive and conspicuous things did not fit in with the atmosphere of Princeton, Murakami finally chose a Volkswagen Corrado that couldn't be more low-key.
As time goes by, does Princeton still have the gentlemanly temperament that Murakami felt in the 1990s? I don't know. But I still want to take this opportunity to share these distant memories with more people. Because just from his evaluation of the car, we can get a glimpse of Murakami's unique attitude towards life, which is a charm similar to that of Italian cars. It is hard to explain, and those who understand it will naturally understand its preciousness.
Italian cars left a deep impression on Murakami. After his trip to Europe, Murakami brought back to Japan the Lancia Delta 1600GT he bought in Rome. But he soon sold it to an acquaintance. Not long after that, Murakami bought another new car, also an Italian car.
“Thump, thump, thump… it makes me happy after all,” Murakami wrote.
