For Luca Dal Monte an interesting new book with Enzo Ferrari as the protagonist

Luca Dal Monte’s new book

A new work by award-winning translator Luca Dal Monte has been published by Cairo Editore: it is titled ‘Ferrari – Presumed Guilty’ and recounts a little-known affair dating back almost seventy years. May 12, 1957, the 24th edition of the Mille Miglia, the race of the Italians. A Ferrari driven by Spanish marquis Alfonso De Portago goes disastrously off the road, killing nine spectators. Among them are five children. De Portago and his co-équipier, American Edmund Nelson, also lose their lives with them. The race is not suspended. But once the dead are buried, controversy erupts. They will be colossal and overwhelm the race, which will be abolished. But this is Italy, and so a culprit is sought, who is soon identified in the figure of Enzo Ferrari, the Modenese manufacturer of the world’s most famous sports cars. The accusations point the finger at him. Immediately an investigation is opened. Ferrari’s passport and driver’s license are revoked, as if he had been driving De Portago’s car. The court-ordered technical report nails him. Ferrari is indicted for multiple manslaughter, and faces jail time for a few decades. In a still heavily Catholic Italy, the Church also takes the field. L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s media outlet, accuses him of being a “modernized Saturn devouring his own children,” where by children they mean pilots. After a moment of bewilderment, so unusual for the Drake, who was touched to the core by the tragedy, Ferrari sets off on the counterattack, in what will be the most difficult battle of his legendary existence. In a crescendo of emotions until the final denouement, like a race at three hundred miles per hour, the book draws on the original trial documents consulted for the first time in their entirety and reads like an author’s legal thriller.

Luca Dal Monte was born in Cremona in 1963. His books are read and translated all over the world. His Ferrari Rex won the Selezione Bancarella Sport Award and was a finalist for the Royal Automobile Club’s Motoring Book of the Year Award. The New York Times referred to it as “the definitive biography” of Enzo Ferrari. Apple+ TV is currently making a television series out of it. In addition to numerous successful works of nonfiction, Dal Monte also has a novel and two books of short stories to his credit.