Getting a taste of la dolce vita, Cindy-Lou Dale takes a Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 for a spin in northern Italy.
Lamborghini’s test-driver, Moreno, thrust a meaty hand at me, shaking my hand, and I, vigorously. “I now show you how this car she handles.” Lamborghini, the former tractor builder turned supercar dream factory, seemed to be staring down a bland barrel when Audi took over, but the partnership has been the stuff of legend as the new owners brought Lamborghini into the realms of a usable, reliable supercar. The wild wings and flared wheel arches of yesteryear are gone; so too are the protruding buttresses. The complex V12 has been replaced by a 5L V10, which almost makes it economical. Sensible, even. Other vehicles look somewhat sterile by comparison; even a Ferrari F430 is emasculated when parked beside the overt and wild Gallardo. Positively radiant with ignorance, I climbed into the passenger seat and Moreno eased us out of the Lamborghini’s factory gates in Sant’Agata, some 20 miles from Bologna, Italy.
We reached our training destination just a few miles down the road, where Moreno began by showing me the controls. Just minutes later, it was me climbing into the driver’s seat of the Gallardo LP560-4, trying to supress small yelps of excitement. The V10 engine roared to life and growled patiently while I reworked the gears. There’s no console-mounted gear shift, just a trio of flat buttons labelled ‘Sport’, ‘A’ (automatic) and ‘Corsa’ (kill mode), plus a pair of shift paddles on either side of the steering wheel and two pedals on the floor. The Sport setting tightens up the gear shifting and Corsa, newly added to the LP560, takes driving a step closer to full-race, which I thought I’d enable from a standing start. I engaged the throttle and proceeded to launch forward at a neck breaking speed. This car is so souped up that the instant the accelerator is touched, however lightly or tentatively, it will blast off at a speed and velocity seldom seen outside of a Road Runner cartoon. This would be something I’d have to remind myself of often throughout the next week in northern Italy in order to maintain the cool required when driving such a car.
Gallardo LP560-4: The Stuff of Dreams
I left Sant’Agata, navigating a winding mountain road to Tuscany. My husband Jonathan was sitting in the passenger seat, becoming impatient. He was fidgeting with the radio and threatened to replace the audible Lamborghini roar with BBC World Service. Clearly he wanted to drive. After a few hours of driving in a stately lack of haste, and quietly squabbling like a fractious married couple, I pulled up at the service station and introduced a shot of coffee to my lips whilst Jonathan filled the car’s very thirsty petrol tank.
After threading my way through the crowd gathered around the car, I ceremoniously handed the keys to Jonathan with some relief. Now I could survey the countryside and continue my observations of the pathologically aggressive driving habits of Italians who pay no attention to anything happening on the road ahead of them. After further surveillance from my vantage point in the passenger seat, I concluded they had far better things to be doing while driving: tooting horns, gesticulating wildly, preventing other vehicles from cutting into their lane, making love, scolding the children in the back seat and eating a sandwich the size of a cricket bat. Often all at once. I love Italy.
We made regular stops in areas of quiet prosperity: dreamy Italian villages where houses disappeared into the treetops, all rooted to an ancient past. In one such village, the ever present audience offered up a local who enquired after and translated Jonathan’s words about the car’s performance. After several years of living in the sort of place where a dead cow draws a crow, I quickly became blasé about the attention the Gallardo attracted, so I stood off to one side and studied the dramatics of it.
Jonathan knows how to feel a crowd and manipulate it, massage it with his voice which rose and fell, grew harsh then soft again, shot forward in a rapid spate of words and then rested until his audience silently begged for him to continue. The crowd leaned forward, drawn impulsively toward him. One elderly gentleman, visibly moved by the car and associated theatrics, asked if he could touch the car. His voice was tight with emotion: “She is the car of my dreams. Perhaps a dream shared by all of Italy.”
La Dolce Vita
Eventually we arrived at Grosse and our luxury accommodations: L’Andana, a 33 roomed authentic Tuscan villa on a 500-hectare estate. An indulgent spa treatment, a swordfish dinner in their La Villa restaurant and a deep comfortable bed awaited our arrival.
Over the next few days we took in a tasting of truffle flavoured olive oil and aged vinegar at the private vineyards of Tenuta Casanova, visited the prestigious Petra wine estate where we were introduced to some of Italy’s best reds. Then, of course, there were the quaint mountain villages, each webbed with cobbled alleyways filled with old timers gossiping in doorways of shops where cheeses the size of car tyres were sold and strings of sausages hung in the windows. We walked past delis with their doors and shuttered windows open, and sidewalk cafes where people sat almost motionless with their newspapers and espressos. This was Italy, I thought, the heart of Western civilization; home to opera, the Vatican, the Renaissance, da Vinci, Versace, Prada, Gucci…and the supercar.
On our way back to the Lamborghini headquarters, we brushed past the medieval mountain village of Compiano (Parma) where we stopped to take in the views. Within minutes word got out that a supercar had arrived and soon it was surrounded by admirers. After considering a menu pinned to the wall of La Vecchia, a little temple of great food and ambience found on the village piazza, we decided to stay for lunch. You will appreciate that for a couple whose foreign cuisine knowledge begins and ends with tinned spaghetti, travelling abroad requires a certain kind of vigilance, especially when visiting a country whose people voluntarily ingest tongues, donkey meat, intestines, sausage made of congealed blood, and the brains of little cows. We instead feasted on chestnut gnocchi with ricotta. Later we were presented with a further luscious quantity of homemade wild mushrooms pasta, drizzled with olive oil, all the while guzzling on a bottle of Chianti. Allowing Jonathan the glory of returning the Lamborghini to the headquarters some 50 miles yonder, I drank, I confess, an intemperate amount of wine, and tottered, a trifle wobbly, back to the car by way of several shrubs. La dolce vita indeed.
