This car is possibly the most Italian thing on the planet; even more Italian than smiling indulgently as your suspiciously black-haired elderly Prime Minister appoints former topless models to the cabinet or attempts to bed an eighteen-year old. So it makes no sense to translate the Alfa Romeo 8C Spider’s name into dull, humble Anglo-Saxon. Even Alfa’s staff with their near-flawless English don’t bother to Anglicize it, and simply refer to it as the otto-chee as one tosses me the keys.

So otto-chee it is, then. But is the noisy, gorgeous otto-chee Spider actually any good, or are we in danger of being seduced by a La Scala–standard tenor in a perfect Brioni suit?

If price alone conferred supercar status there’d be no debate. The 8C Competizione coupe, of which 500 were made, cost £112,000 in the UK. The Spider, of which another 500 were made from 2009 with 35 coming to the UK, cost an eye-watering £174,000. Objectively, that price was hard to justify. The Ferrari California, with its more aristocratic badge and folding hard-top costs a good BMW 3-series less. But the looks, the noise, the name and the rarity are plainly enough; value for money isn’t a consideration, and they both sold out fast. You can still buy them from dealers, of course, but demand means you’ll pay closer to Spider money for a low-mileage coupe now.

So what do you get for your fifth of a million euros? The engine is the same as the coupe’s: a Ferrari-cast, Maserati-derived 4.7-litre V8 making 450bhp and maybe the most extraordinarily exuberant noise of any car on sale. The pulchritudinous looks are as good as the coupe’s too. The best-looking, best-sounding car of recent years? Quite possibly, and for many the debate ends there.

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And it is very loud; the exhaust maintains a constant conversation with you when just manoeuvring; you’ll turn heads even when parallel parking. At higher revs it hardens into a hollow bellow with a prolonged crackle and bang when you shift gear. The Alfa engineer – Italian, naturally – who took me out for a couple of familiarization laps at the firm’s Balocco test track gave up trying to describe it — or make himself heard over it — and just started waving his right arm in the air in a lassoing motion when he thought it sounded particularly nice, which was most of the time.

This is a fast, powerful car, but at the risk of sounding terminally spoiled, it isn’t that fast; not quite fast enough to justify that price or put any significant distance between the 8C and rivals at a fraction of the price. A 0-100kmh time of 4.5sec and top speed of 290kmh are very nice to have regular access to, but aren’t significantly quicker than a Porsche Carrera S, and are appreciably behind the sub-four of the California.

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But while the engine disguises an average performance — by the standards of the class — with sharp responses and a showy exhaust note, the handling is very well-judged but just doesn’t excite you. The steering is weighty, direct and quick enough but mute; experience rather than sensation tells you that the car will go where you point it. Same with the brakes; now carbon-ceramic, they’re long in travel and lacking in feel.

Objectively, the 8C Spider doesn’t have the specification or the dynamics to justify the price. But it doesn’t need them, because the more Alfa asked for the 8C, and the rarer it made it, the less it competed in any objective sense with other supercars. Those lucky enough to have one will have Ferraris already and won’t be blind to the otto-chee’s shortcomings. But they’ll also love Alfas, and know that this is one of the stand-out cars in the firm’s storied, century-long history.

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And it bodes well for the new 4C. That car might be very different in specification and price; it will cost around £40,000, and deliver a similar sub-5-second 60mph time but with a 232bhp four moving just 850kgs. But the intent is the same; a bespoke, low-volume sports car to keep us in love with Alfa, and most importantly keep the brand in America until the Mitos and Giuliettas get there in force. The 8C did all of that. It’s still doing it. We think the 4C will do the same, and be just as ineffably Italian.

Look at your car. Ignore the kerbed alloy and the parking dent and the fact that you didn’t get around to cleaning it last weekend. Look beyond all that. Look at its forms, its details, its edges and curves. How does it make you feel when you really look at it? If it leaves you cold, it’s a crime. There’s no excuse for lazy, passionless car design; you have been cheated. If — even when it’s parked — the looks suggest speed and freedom and all the other things you love about driving your car, the designer has done his job. The very best-looking cars are simply beautiful; if you own a DS or a Miura or an Alfa 8C, just looking at it might be enough.

But is it art? You might get the same instinctive, irrational, love it-loathe it reaction to a car as you do to a painting or a sculpture, but can it qualify as a work of art? I’m going to argue that it doesn’t, but it does get very close. Perhaps a car magazine shouldn’t be attempting to answer such big questions — but one definition of art is that it exists purely for its own sake. The shape of your car does not; the designer has had to package an engine in a given position and a given number of seats and doors, and wrap it all in a shape that slips efficiently through the air and won’t try to take off over 100mph.

This is design, not art, but the car industry has produced some of the most emotive design of the last century. The French philosopher Roland Barthes wrote when the Citroen DS was launched in 1955 that the car was now the “exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.”

The comparison between architecture and car design is a good one. Buildings and cars each have a function beyond their physical appearance; we ought to care how they look, and too often are let down. The comparison of cars with cathedrals is even better. One is a place of worship, the other an object of worship. It’s hard to separate how they look from what they represent. Believers look at a great church and see divinity in its beauty and the fact that it was built at all. Our reaction to great cars is maybe a little more prosaic, but the same thing happens; we look at a Ferrari 250 and can’t dissociate its looks from the knowledge that it is fast and rare and expensive and sensationally exciting to drive.

So, some examples of the greatest car design/art. We’ve wanted our cars to look good since Edwardian times; as soon as we’d cracked getting them to drive at more than a few miles per hour and for more than a few miles without breaking down, we’ve wanted them to look more than purely functional. Those ungainly, upright things with bicycle mudguards and their guts on public display soon gave way to styled, streamlined sheet metal.

Despite a much shorter history, great car design, like great art, forms movements, grouped around a certain place or time. Europe in the mid-thirties gave us the first real rush of beauty with the 1935 Alfa Romeo 8C and the 1937 Bugatti Atlantic.  Fifties America was another locus; the cars weren’t always beautiful but, like pop art, they were an incredibly self-confident reflection of an incredibly self-confident society which the car itself had helped create. Back to Italy for the sixties, where designers with names like Old Masters created first bewitching, almost unobtainable coupes and roadsters for Ferrari and others, before producing the Miura: the first supercar, and arguably the most beautiful car ever drawn, though we won’t get bogged down in that row here.

And just like art, attribution is everything; despite being designed 43 years ago, a pedantic but amusing row still simmers between Gandini and Giugiaro — now old men — over who really created the Miura.

But how many truly beautiful cars have there been since then? Car designers have always had to work around the constraints imposed on them by the engineers and aerodynamicists. There’s an argument that the constraints are now too tight for designers to create anything beautiful. Add the legal requirements of all the countries where the car sells and, according to Jaguar design chief Ian Callum, skinning a car becomes a ‘join the dots exercise’. Callum knows good design; one critic wrote that his Aston Martin DB7 has ‘the sort of beauty the car world is lucky to see once in a generation”. His seductive XK coupe and XF saloon have re-established Jaguar’s reputation as a maker of the world’s best-looking cars, anchored by the ’49 XK120, the ’61 E-type and the ’68 XJ, but he isn’t sure he could do something as unfettered as the DB7 again.

It isn’t Callum’s work, but the Bugatti Veyron exemplifies his thinking. At €1.2m, handbuilt in tiny numbers and with no purpose other than to delight its owners it ought to be a visual masterpiece, as ‘30s Bugattis were. But the Veyron’s styling is its least-discussed attribute; the demands of packaging its monstrous mechanicals, cooling its 1001 horsepower engine and preventing it from taking flight at 253mph mean that when you first encounter it you’re surprised by its unthreatening, unremarkable egg-shape.

But we are still making great looking cars, if not cars that border on art. Look at the new Alfa 8C, or even the Fiat 500, cars whose visual appeal is so strong that discerning car people are prepared to ignore the fact that they’re not that great to drive. Patrick le Quement, about to retire after 43 years as a car designer and 22 as the head of Renault design is more sanguine than Callum. “Yes, we’re all suffering a little bit, and the European pedestrian protection rules mean the noses of our cars look a little bit like Le Mans-ready Porsche 911s, but ingenious engineers will find us a little more flexibility. I think we could be entering a new golden era.”

By Ben Oliver

It’s common knowledge that to own an Alfa is a right of passage for every passionate lover of cars. Exactly why that is held to be a universal truth is not so easy to explain. Apart from their historical unreliability and the notoriously inadequate finish and build quality of even some recent launches from the classic brand, in our opinion, some recent Alfas have been downright clunky. The bubble-butted Alfasud was a rustbucket that haunted many a teenage dream with financial woe and crushing disappointment (my own included). The 156 was dull and the 159 was better but lacked a defining ‘Alfa’-factor. The Brera and the GT are undoubtedly pretty, but until the 8C Competizione finally went into production a couple of years ago, it looked like the company that brought us the breathtaking Type 33 Stradale and the Montreal had settled onto the weakly-lit plateau of uncharacteristic mediocrity. But something happened with the launch of the first genuine supercar from Alfa for a couple of decades – and it is the revolution wrought by the 8C’s staggering beauty that is encoded in the Mito’s accessible blend of sensuality and affordability.

The launch of the three basic versions of the Mito in January this year caused a stir amongst Italian car obsessives, primarily because the company’s aim to produce the sportiest compact car ever just might have been achieved. You can see the sweeping, triangular lines of the 8C in the little car’s face and flank, and reports are that the looks are reflected in the driving experience. The launch this week of the Mito GTA concept, which is due to be unveiled at the Geneva show in a couple of weeks’ time, is a further demonstration of Alfa’s continued commitment to cars with sporty soul and innovation. In line with the famous GTA (Gran Turismo Alleggerito) signature, (Alleggerito means reduced weight in Italian), according to Alfa’s press releases the Mito GTA Concept prioritises weight reduction and an optimum power-to-weight ratio. They’ve lightened the car considerably and lowered its centre of gravity by making components such as the tailgate spoiler, roof and mirror fairings in carbon-fibre; while aluminium is to be used extensively in the braking system, suspension, and some parts of the chassis. The compact new petrol engine employs advanced tech including direct injection, dual variable valve timing, state-of-the-art turbocharging and advanced electronic management systems. Alfa reckon the 1.8 litres will produce around 240 BHP. Under-floor aerodynamics have been improved, and the entire car has been lowered by 20mm and the comprehensively revised chassis boasts an ‘active’ suspension system, which counteracts the transfer of load under acceleration, stiffening the rear end and maximising traction. The suspension also interacts with the braking system and steering to obtain the most efficient control of vehicle dynamics imaginable.

Evolution is rarely a smooth, gradual process. Sometimes it takes a bold leap like the 8C to infiltrate the bloodline of an automotive legend. The repackaging of the essence of a true Italian supercar in a little runabout whose efficiency and affordability chimes with the times is the most exciting development to hit our streets in some considerable time.