Ferrari’s Great Ace

No other Grand Prix winner has ever sung Puccini, Verdi and Leoncavallo in public or been able to cook like Chicago’s star chef, Charlie Trotter—no driver except Giuseppe Campari that is. Campari could do all of those things, as well as win classic road races like the Mille Miglia. Talents were locked up inside a simple, fat man with dusky skin, which led to some ignoble racist giving Campari the vaguely offensive nickname of El Negher—“the Black”—in Milan’s quirky Italian dialect.

Campari was a nobody in 1912, when he shut his modest suburban repair shop in Milan. But, thanks to good old-fashioned Italian nepotism, he went to work for the two-year-old ALFA company as an apprentice mechanic. There, he began to discover who he really was: a uniquely talented individual, rather than just one more bit of rather overweight factory fodder. Giuseppe Campari blossomed into the kind of racing driver Enzo Ferrari once described as a great ace, a heroic capturer of headlines in a career that spanned 20 years. Just before he died, so tragically at Monza at the age of 41, Campari announced he would soon stop racing cars and begin a new profession as an opera singer. And he was deadly serious.

Some sneered and gave Campari a hard time about his love of opera. They even ridiculed him when he, without any training, courageously took to the stage of an opera house and turned in a more-than-competent version of Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s emotional “Vesti la Giuba” from “I Pagliaci.” But none poked fun at him as they ate one of the wonderful dinners at his home on a cold winter’s night, prepared from start to finish by Campari himself. A typical menu would be a starter of spaghetti with jugged hare sauce, followed by roast loin of veal with all the trimmings and the egg and Marsala wine dessert zabagliòne, to be enjoyed with, in turn, a heavy, winter-warming Barolo, a pleasantly light and dry Chianti and a delightfully complementary Moscato Bianco.