– You were still at school during those years, weren’t you?

– No, I had already finished. I didn’t like school. It’s not that I didn’t do well there, but I couldn’t develop a liking for Latin at all. The PE teacher was a despot, always ready to tell you off. I used to tell myself “I need to do something to become better than him! So, when the law that made the school compulsory until 14 years old was passed, I thought about repeating the second year of middle school twice. To sum it up: I turned 14 on 16^th June, on the 12^th I finished school and, on my birthday, I went to work at my father’s.

– What was working in the workshop like, during the early days?

– What was it like? I was accepted like I was the resident idiot. The comment was: “Cretin, you failed the school year, come on… put the tyres on! Sweep the floor! Sort out the wood shavings!” We worked hard all day long, until the evening. There were some people who welded and had the blowtorch with the tubes, the gasometer with the silicon carbide in it, to make gas (because we made it), acetylene, oxygen… We had to close the taps, make sure that they didn’t stay open overnight and then we had to “wrap up the rubbers” so that the tubes didn’t twist.

– And did you do your best?

– I had to, otherwise, it was a big problem!

– What was your father like with you? Besides him reprimanding you for failing the school year, did he treat you as a son, in the workshop?

– Oh no, absolutely not! He constantly told me off, so that the others understood that there were no preferences. We had to do things well, there was no escaping that. When my father got angry, he kicked the bins hard and used to shout “you don’t understand a thing, you’re an idiot, I was right about that!” But I never saw him getting majorly angry… If he said “do it like this”, it meant that that was how we had to do it. And if something was wrong, I was the one that he shouted at in front of everyone. Well “everyone”… there were eleven of us back then. Not that many.

– It must not have been easy. How did you feel?

– How do you think I felt? Bad, of course. I never dared to contradict my father in front of the others. At home I did, often, we had discussions to justify our choices and to clear the air between us. If I was right, my father was the first to admit that. I thought: it’s hard to climb the ladder! Then one blow with Afro Gibellini, one with Giancarlo Guerra and one with Amleto… a day he put me to work as a help in the manufacturing department. How did it work? They gave me a piece of cardboard with the shape and I had to cut out the metal sheet. The masters used to tell me “Here there is a 1cm bend and you put it in this mask, then you hammer all around it” and so I already made the little pieces that the others assembled later.

– Do you mean your teachers?

– Yes. My first teacher was my father, a teacher in life and at work. 

– And what about the others, what were they like as teachers?

– Oh, they were anything but tender. When I made a mistake soldering, some of them burned the hair off my hand!

– Really?

– Yes, but each one of them helped me in their own way. Of course, the methods were what they were: a slap and that’s it.

– Would you have liked to become a panel beater? Or was that only a starting point for you, before you moved on to something else?

– I liked that, but I had something else on my mind. Beating metal isn’t easy, but you need to be careful not to put anywhere there is already too much of it, or not to remove it where it’s missing. The best tools are your eyes and your sensitivity of intuition, hearing if the hammering is solid or a tic, tic, tic. You know, there are some people who hammer too much, which is useless. The hammering needs to have a purpose: the hammer shouldn’t be stroked but dominated. However, as I mentioned previously, my head was elsewhere. What I really wanted was to make a car.

Playing with cars… all children started like that: with the car seen as a toy, a little like a first (rudimental) treasure. That is why desiring to make a car has a lot of meaning. It’s a sort of threshold, an open door on adulthood.

An obvious question comes to mind.

– What was the first car that you made?

– Well, I started when I was 14 years old and we made the long wheelbase California and the Tour the France. I made the California’s doors with Afro Gibellini, who, as well as Ferrari Franco, was in charge of making niches, small doors, air inlets and the mouth of the GTO. Then, I worked with Giancarlo Guerra and I learned to make the underbody, the shells… He knew how to make everything! I learned how to make the windscreen’s frames when they were manufactured over three pre-shaped and pre-cut metal sheets with adaptable development, because we bent the metal sheet when it was already shaped, and when it was finished, it was shaped like a cone. We made all of the different developments out of cardboard, with the first piece made, you adapted it to the mask, then you piled the development, you put it back on the metal sheets and you cut out pieces which were all the same and with the right development, so that when you bent it, it went to its own position spontaneously, without needing corrections, hammering or further soldering. Fiat already pressed that kind of metal sheets, but they wasted a whole sheet to make a frame, and it was a large sheet too. Whereas, as we cut out the developments, we placed one inside the other, therefore there was less waste. On the other hand, all pieces were cut out by hand: therefore, the labour cost was higher for the product, but there was a significant saving in terms of material.

– Roughly speaking, we got to the 60’s: the golden age for the Carrozzeria Scaglietti. I wonder how many important people came to you…

– Yes, in the 60’s I saw many of those: lucky people. Look at Marzotto, for example, an excellence within the weaving industry.  You should have seen Marzotto when he came to our workshop, enthusiastic to see the metal sheets being hammered, he was very fond of cars. Another person who I remember in particular was Greg Garrison, TV producer and director, a friend of Frank Sinatra, of Sammy Davis Jnr, of Dean Martin… I liked him because he could make the artist, the oil company director and the politician roles all together. He enchanted me! In Montecarlo, he used to rent an attic and invite all of his friends, there were people there of all social statuses. He dealt with everybody. He could sell stuff to everybody and he had his own cut. He was a quick-change artist, and he made a lot of money. He had something like nine or ten Ferraris, all with personalised finishings and he lived on others’ work. I considered him to be a chameleon and that was what aroused my curiosity. I used to think to myself: if I could juggle between kings, princes, billionaires, politicians, actors!