Biography of a driven founder
Luca Dal Monte’s book remembers Enzo Ferrari for charm, intelligence
WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.— Luca Dal Monte is eyeing the 1966 Ferrari 275 GTB sitting on the shop floor here at Dominick’s European Car Repair. He has travelled from his home in Milan to promote his latest book, a biography of the car’s namesake, Enzo Ferrari.
The 954-page scholarly tome (more than 1,000 pages in Italian) has received rave reviews in Italy since it came out in 2016, and has been optioned for an Italian miniseries. (According to Il Giornale, an Italianlanguage newspaper based in Milan, the book reads like a novel.) David Bull Publishing recently released an Englishlanguage version of the book Enzo Ferrari: Power, Politics and the Making of an Automotive Empire in the United States. Dal Monte, an Americanophile who was the head of Ferrari’s North American press office from 2001 to 2005, wrote the book in Italian and translated it himself into English for a U.S. audience. He met me here at this mecca for Italian cars and their admirers, outside New York City. We’re going for a spirited drive through Westchester County in the limited production 12-cylinder automobile that he’s presently admiring.
The steel grey coupe is a fitting emblem with which to remember Ferrari the man, along with the business he founded almost 70 years ago. Like most Ferraris, the car is stunning and not cheap: It cost $14,000 (U.S.) when it was built more than 50 years ago and might bring as much as $3.5 million from a collector today were it for sale, underscoring one reason Ferrari has been called the world’s most powerful luxury brand.
The company’s success owes everything to its founder, who was born in 1898, and had little formal education. He was inspired to become a race-car driver after seeing Felice Nazzaro win the 1908 Circuito di Bologna. But it wasn’t until after World War II, at the age of 49, that he created his car company.
Ferrari is often remembered solely as cold and calculating, with his trademark trench coat and dark sunglasses. But Dal Monte wants readers to see the genius that Ferrari possessed. Yes, he was stubborn, but he was driven and determined to be successful.
He used his charm and intelligence to get others to invest in him, said Dal Monte, who saw these qualities in Ferrari’s personal correspondence and his relationship with his sons, Alfredo “Dino,” who died in 1956 at the age of 24 from muscular dystrophy, and Piero, who was born out of wedlock to Ferrari’s longtime mistress, Lina Lardi. (Ferrari’s wife, Laura, suffered severe depression her entire life, and though he had affairs with other women, they remained married until she died in1978. Ferrari never remarried and died in 1988.)
“In Italy, there was the pope and then there was Enzo,” Dal Monte said as we drove north on New York Route 22, which hugs the state’s border with Connecticut. The GTB’s V-12 engine screams with sophisticated mellifluous authority as revs climb, but Dal Monte is used to speaking over mechanical commotion.
What the book does not capture is the circuitous route Dal Monte took going from Cremona to wrangling reporters in the United States, the world’s largest market for Ferrari, or how he came to write this comprehensive book.
Dal Monte said it all goes back to his second great love (after cars and Ferrari): all things American. When he was a senior in high school, he spent a year as an exchange student in Kentucky and later attended the University of Kentucky, majoring in U.S. history while writing for the student newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel.
Though his first impulse was to become a journalist after graduating, when he returned to Italy, he was offered a plum job as a top executive in Peugeot’s Italian press office. Dal Monte said that his fluency in English and knowledge of U.S. culture helped him professionally at an early age and eventu- ally got him the job at Ferrari.
Dal Monte had met Antonio Ghini, Ferrari’s spokesperson in Italy, while visiting the company’s archives to research his first book about Formula One racing, which came out in Italy in 1999.
In spring 2001, Dal Monte remembers, Ghini asked him: “‘How would you like to go back home? How would you like to go back for Ferrari?’ And what do you think my reply was? ‘When can I start?’ ”
His duties grew to include overseeing the U.S. relaunch of the Maserati brand, owned by this time, like Ferrari, by Fiat. But more the historian and journalist at heart than a marketing man, Dal Monte liked writing. His position with Maserati, which brought him back to Italy, gave him access to a wide range of primary materials. “One of the greatest assets in my research was the Alfa Romeo archives in Arese, near Milan.” There he found Enzo Fer- rari’s personnel file from when Ferrari managed the company’s race team. These files documented Ferrari’s importance to Alfa Romeo, the great Italian racing power.
Dal Monte’s sense of history, however, was not solely grounded in dusty file folders and old racing scorecards. In addition to archival research, he moved to Modena, where Ferrari is based, a working city that also serves as a shrine to the man and his automobiles. There he met and befriended many figures from Ferrari’s life over the course of the eight years it took him to write this book.
Still, “American politics is my real passion, and American history,” Dal Monte confessed. In Italy, his book is titled Ferrari Rex, a reference to Edmund Morris’ three-part well-regarded biography of Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Rex. “My aim was high, to do for Ferrari what Morris did for Roosevelt.”