‘We drive to obey to our nature’. Meet today’s gentlemen drivers.

Photography Alberto Chimenti Dezani

To mark the release of the new CAM Sugar playlist dedicated to cinema and motors we spent a day with Biscioni, the Alfa Romeo-driving dandies of Torino to discuss cinema, life and classic cars, and understand who are the gentlemen drivers of 2024.

Escaping common decency, public morality and a modernity often seen as suffocating. They love classic cars and a lifestyle that extends beyond the horizon of the dashboards of their motors, to embrace design, sartorial elegance, cuisine, but also cinema and music. These are the gentlemen drivers, who with their classic vehicles have declared their self-imposed exile from the dominant culture, to create their own to the sound of screeching wheels.

On the day of the start of the 1000 Miglia, CAM Sugar releases Gentlemen Drivers, a playlist celebrating the bond between Italian cinema and motors, which you can listen to in the dedicated LISTEN section of the Journal. 

From the Lancia Aurelia B24 driven by Vittorio Gassman in Il sorpasso (1962) to the Ferrari Superamerica in which the Italian film star raced in Il tigre (1967) or the Maserati Ghibli 115 driven in In nome del popolo italiano (1971). From the Fiat 1500 Spider in which Enrico Maria Salerno climbs the hairpin bends of the inland of a scorching Rimini in L’ombrellone (1964) to Ugo Tognazzi’s Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider in La voglia matta (1962), there are countless inimitable cars that have marked the iconography of Cinecittà. Not to mention all the Alfa Romeos destroyed in the chases between police and robbers on the run in Eurocrime films.

But the myth of the gentleman driver on the big screen is not just an Italian affair. Think of Sean Connery and his Aston Martin B5 detours on the Geneva mountains in Goldfinger, or the topical Montecarlo traffic light city race between Lord Brett Sinclair’s (Roger Moore)  Aston Martin DB6 and Danny Wilde’s (Tony Curtis) Ferrari Dino 246GT. 

Hollywood too has incarnated it, most notably in the figure of Steve McQueen. The actor, maverick and bon vivant has forever associated his name with iconic cars including the Ford Mustang GT in Bullit (1968), the Rolls Royce Silver Shadow in The Thomas Crown Affair (1967) and, ça va sans dire, the Porsche 917K in Le Mans (1971). The latter, despite being considered cinema’s ultimate testament to the world of motorsports, has a predecessor in the little known Italian film Le Mans, Shortcut to Hell (1970), directed one year prior to the Lee H Katzin’s classic by Osvaldo Civriani, and boasting a superb CAM Sugar score by Stelvio Cipriani – also included in the Gentlemen Drivers playlist.

Fast forward to 2024 and the gentlemen drivers culture and iconography still is the talk of the town, celebrated all over social media with dedicated accounts, above all Gentlemen Drivers, as well as by projects rediscovering Italian car design and its lifestyle, such as Targhe Nere.

To get a better understanding of who the gentlemen drivers of 2024 are and what they do, we met up with Biscioni, a Turin-based group of Alfa Romeo connoisseurs and lovers, that for the last seven years have been combining a dandy and corsair attitude with a striking social media communication, making waves in Italy and beyond.

CAM Sugar: How did Biscioni first come together?

Biscioni Torino: We were looking for a type of car that would distinguish us, define a sense of belonging. The Alfa Romeos of the 1970s thus became the natural testimonials of our counterculture. We gave the group a framework, greater recognisability through social media, but the essence of being Biscioni is more than that.

CS: It seems like Alfa Romeo is, first of all, a matter of style and attitude…

BT: A car is to a Biscione what a suit is to an elegant man. You don’t measure a person’s elegance by the brand they wear, but by how they wear a garment. The details, the particulars make the real difference. The Alfa Romeo is the perfect piece of clothing, the must-have blazer in any self-respected gentleman driver’s wardrobe. The reasons? Well, the most obvious surely is its glorious sporting past, its motoring performance, the unmistakable sound of its carburettors.

CS: The myth of Alfa Romeo, though, goes well beyond performances alone. We’re thinking, for instance, of their bond with cinema…

BT: Undoubtedly, one of the main reasons is this link that certain models, Giulia and Alfetta in particular, have had in the past with a certain underworld operating in the murky period between the 1970s and 1980s. A period in which an Alfa Romeo was always either a protagonist or an extra in the frames [of the films] of the time, sometimes on the side of the good guys, but often in the ranks of the bad guys.

CS: So is that how you feel when at the wheel of your cars? like the unapologetic counter-heroes of Eurocrime films.

BT: What can I say, for a Biscione, the car is a means of demonstrating one’s penchant for perpetual escape from this current world immersed in the controversies of political correctness, in the perverse considerations of those who want to appear without being anyone and those who think they are someone but don’t know how to make themselves known. As the bandits of the 1970s taught us, when you have to escape from something or someone, it is good to do it in a fast, safe and reliable car, preferably an Alfa Romeo.

CS: Tell us more about your cars

BT: Being a Biscione may presuppose owning an Alfa Romeo, but owning an Alfa Romeo is absolutely not a prerequisite for being a Biscione. The Biscione is not a collector, it is not a serial accumulator of cars, it is a lover of the car, of its intrinsic stylistic essence and its natural propensity to be a means of escape, both physically and mentally. Everyone’s garage is a wardrobe from which one can always draw the right car to suit one’s mood, the occasion, the need.

CS: So what make a Biscione? The car or the gentleman driving it?

BT: The protagonist is not the car but its driver: a Biscione is not recognised by the vehicle he drives but by the style with which they drive it. They will hardly own only Alfa Romeos, they will hardly all be perfectly maintained, they will hardly look like they just came out of the dealership. The Biscione is a true all-round amateur, they love many cars because of their insatiable thirst for pleasure, taking care not to exaggerate too much, which would lead them to be superficial, put them on the same level of the many who get a classic car only to show off at Sundays rallies or village fetes. The Biscione is not loyal to a brand or a car: it is loyal to a style and a state of mind inextricably linked to the car.

CS: How do you fulfil the Biscioni’s social agenda?

BT: A characteristic of the Biscioni, the authentic ones, is that they almost never give themselves an appointment, but rather meet. The Biscione use their agendas for business appointments, their instinct for meetings with their peers.

CS: So where do your Turin get-togethers take place?

BT: There is a place in Turin that has become, almost by chance, our meeting point, the [bar] Ballantines. But it is a meeting point where we never make an appointment; that is the base from which we start, the den in which we meet, in which we find shelter. Then every meeting is the start of an experience: a dinner, an evening in a nightclub, always with our cars in the streets and left double-parked, or parked illegally. Because the Biscione occasionally feels the need to go against the law, not to disobey authority but to obey its own nature.

CS: How do gentlemen drivers become part of Biscioni?

BT: Everyone in our small group perceives membership not because of adherence to a founding statute, but because of the golden rule that defines coexistence in all social conditions, which is the attractive force between fellow human beings. The Biscioni are not a club, they are not a sect, they are a bunch of people, each of whom is also a character of himself, who circulates independently in agroup in which they feel part for the whole, the perfect synecdoche within a period in which the consecutio temporum is all about the past.

You can follow Biscioni Torino on Instagram.

Opening image: Driving with Biscioni. Photography Alberto Chimenti Dezani.

TAGS: , Culture