Ferrari FF and Alfa Romeo C 2500

Cars




This week we’re contemplating sixty odd years of aesthetic and technology

Innovation ebbs and flows. Technical solutions sweep all before them, until they too are made obsolete by the passage of time.

Ferrari’s FF, the newly released 12 cylinder, four wheel drive shooting brake, has as much cutting edge technology crammed into its intelligent insides as the average human brain. And the exactitude of its electronic nervous system reaches to the furthest extent of its delightful sinews.

The Alfa C 2500 Competizione from 1948, on the other hand, has none of these things. This beauty was motored by good old valves and carbs and hammered out by Italian craftsmen amid the wreckage of the second world war.

You couldn’t ostensibly find two vehicles farther apart in terms of their way of being-in-the-world.

But of course, they are remarkably close in essence. Gentlemanly in their conception and beautiful in their execution, they are separated by half a century of human ingenuity – yet they share the same balance of form and beauty.

We’re in love with both of them, but for completely different reasons.

 

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