“Bella macchina!” The chorus went up before I’d even been handed the spindly ignition key, echoing around the Milan Four Seasons’ vaulted carriage entrance. In the days ahead those two words would be constant companions, bellowed from bus-stops and café terraces, mouthed through rain-speckled glass and perennially accessorised with kissed fingertips.
Italians love cars like no other people on earth, and as a feminised object of desire there can be few macchine more belle than the first Alfa Romeo Giulietta. Mine for 1,000 kilometres: a powder-blue 1961 drop-top Spider, a pocket symphony of harmonious curves behind that iconic dog-muzzle grille, La Dolce Vita on wheels. Or rather not mine but ours, because this was a drive that begged to be done à deux. My wife nestled down beside me in the slender, low-backed seats; Giulietta to my Romeo. (Those incurable innamorati at Alfa just couldn’t help themselves — even the dowdy Giulietta estate was launched as the Promiscua.)
The Four Seasons hotels in both Milan and Florence already offer vintage Giuliettas for day-trip hire, ideal for an afternoon pootle about Lake Como and Chianti respectively. But the journey ahead was no pootle. We were trailblazing a new and more ambitious “experience” being launched by the company this autumn — a triangular classic-car tour between Milan, Cap Ferrat on the French C?te d’ and Florence, overnighting at its properties in each location. A proper continental road-trip, indeed a bijou grand tour, at the wheel of a 55-year-old classic worth upwards of €70,000 in this state of immaculate restoration. We could have opted for an even more precious vehicle from the classics on offer — a 1958 Mercedes 190SL, perhaps, or even a 1948 Bentley. But in terms of spirit, style and manageability, nothing else seemed as well suited to the assignment.