Enzo Ferrari - A Life [antikvár]

An Agitator of Men In the end, in his last days, what frightened him most was the idea of losing his memory. He talked about it constantly. He tried medicines that promised to arrest the slow decay. Medicines that would help him hold on to the ghosts and the stories of nine decades. Memories of shooting arrows at a target with his brother Alfredo outside their father's workshops. Of lying in a hospital for incurables at the end of the Great War. Of the roar of the first engine to carry his name, summoned to life on a chiUy spring morning in Emilia. Of his dead son, bending over a drawing board. Of taking a racing driver to lunch in the private room of the restaurant across the road and watching his face and his hands as they discussed money. Of the dogs who had accompanied him on his excursions, a poodle called Sambo and a German shepherd called Box, travelling in the boot of his car. Of evenings in the hotel across the square, with cards and drink and girls. Of Sunday afternoons in his farmhouse at the test track, watching the races on the television and waiting for the phone to ring. Of the men who were close to him, not the famous ones, the ones who drove his cars and sometimes died in them, but men like Bazzi, his right arm for fifty years, and Peppino, who had known more than anyone about all the lives he had led. His routine seldom varied. On a weekday he rose at eight in his bedroom on the first floor of the big dark four-storey house that stood opposite the Fountain of the Graces in the Largo Garibaldi. Half an hour later, after a five-minute walk past the opera house and through the gate in the old city walls, he would be at the barber's shop, seated in his regular chair, the first on the left. Antonio D'Elia had cut the Ingegnere's hair in his salon in the [I] I 1 ! I '