The Aesthete
Has there ever been, in any of its versions, a more endearing car than the Fiat 500? In the history of aesthetics, there’s something called the ‘pathetic fallacy’. This describes the inclination of poets to attribute human, or, at least, animal, characteristics to inanimate things. Thus, the ‘angry’ sea and so on. A rough sea might be frightening, but it cannot be cross since it has no mind of its own.
Little Fiats defy the laws of aesthetics. Dante Giacosa’s original Cinquecento of 1936 became known as ‘Topolino’, the title of a magazine that in 1932 launched the Disney cartoon character Mickey Mouse in Italy. Thus the car was made a personification of something more than mere mechanical bits. Some years later I bought my first brand-new car, a Fiat 128. This was Giacosa’s last hurrah and I so fell in love with her that I called OAW 115M ‘Giuseppina’. This naming is not something I felt inclined ever to do either before or after. What would I have called my Bentley Continental? Brunhilde? Gertrud?
When the nuova Cinquecento appeared in 1957, the original charm remained. Although, as Lampedusa reckoned, if you want things to stay the same, they must change. And this was all change, design-wise. The engine went aft and the bodywork was altogether more sophisticated.
In Italy of the ricostruzione, steel was in short supply so the new Five Hundred had thinner-gauge metal than was usual. This meant sophisticated curves had to be bent into the panels to give strength, but they also gave ineffable charm. Just compare with slab-sided German Kleinwagen of the same period to understand how a culture deeply invested in sculpture could produce so wonderful, subtle and inimitable a shape.
Indeed, so wonderful that when a new Cinquecento was mooted in 2004, Roberto Giolito’s Trepiuno concept followed 1957 very closely, at least aesthetically. It was the same, but different. And, of course, this was the moment of global nostalgia with the ‘new’ BMW Mini. Even the Porsche Boxster received a very weak signal from the mid-1950s 550 RSK. Maybe this repetition was millennial crisis. But this is how culture works. As Gustav Mahler noted, creativity is a matter of tending the flame, not of worshipping the ashes.
Which brings
