Quotes of the Day

Velocity is hardly a term called to mind by today's Italy, hobbled as it is by a stagnant economy, failing infrastructure and nonfunctioning government. So perhaps it makes sense that Rome's city council, eager to point out that stasis is not Italy's natural condition, is sponsoring an exhibition that showcases the fastest of the country's past glories. "The Legend of Speed: Art, Motorization and Society in 20th Century Italy" at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni takes visitors on a journey through a century of Italian art, design, fashion, cinema and technology to remind them of what global pacesetters Italians have been. Stretched to its conceptual limits, the show's theme of velocity allows for the inclusion of many of Italy's most dazzling products — from Futurist artworks to Pucci dresses and Olivetti typewriters.

The star of the show, and of the nation's past century, is the automobile industry. "Italy is known as the place where the most beautiful cars are made," says curator Patrizia Pietrogrande. "Ferrari and Alfa Romeo are representative of Italian elegance and style." Fittingly, then, a spectacular array of cars greets visitors as they arrive at the neoclassical Palazzo. Contemporary models include the Ferrari driven by Michael Schumacher when he clinched the company's fifth consecutive Formula One Championship in 2003, and the Ducati Desmosedici motorbike that bore Australian Casey Stoner to victory at the 2007 MotoGP World Championship. But television has acquainted us with these streamlined, postmodern missiles; more precious is the chance to see the Fiat that won the 1907 French Grand Prix. Its frame now seems impossibly frail, but in their time, vehicles like this prompted the founder of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, to exult that racing cars were more "beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace."

A clutch of key Futurist artworks further testifies to that movement's rapturous celebration of the machine age. Typical in its depiction of repetitive, colliding shapes is Giacomo Balla's 1913 monochrome watercolor Automobile + speed + light. Futurism's glorification of man-made power was not politically innocent; it fed directly into the country's rising nationalism, a cause ardently embraced by the poet-pilot Gabriele D'Annunzio. He became the figurehead of the Irredentists, who wanted once-Italian territories returned to their homeland. The show includes such pathos-laden d'Annunzio memorabilia as the tattered logbook he kept when he drove at the head of the ill-fated invasion of Fiume in Dalmatia in 1919, and letters written to him in the 1920s by Fiat boss Giovanni Agnelli.

Slow Motion
The show's curators have suspended a 1929 Fiat Hydroplane above one room and surrounded it with second-wave Futurist canvases from the same period. Their gravity-defying shapes were intended to celebrate aeronautical motion, but these paintings lack the meticulous artistry that characterized their forerunners. Still, almost 500 years after Leonardo da Vinci conceived the world's first flying machine, this gallery is a shrine to Italy's aircraft industry, which flourished in the 1930s, sustained by Fascism's colonial ambitions.

After those aspirations were finally extinguished with the fall of Benito Mussolini in 1943, post-war Italy used the Marshall Plan's funds to exploit its creative talent to the full. Iconic designs include the Cisitalia 202 Gran Sport, a 1947 automobile whose svelte curves were emblematic of the epoch's streamlined aesthetic; and Piaggia's Vespa 150 GS, similar to the one ridden by Audrey Hepburn in the 1953 film Roman Holiday. Speed also played its part in the golden age of Italian cinema; witness the Lancia Spider that homegrown idol Vittorio Gassman drove in Il Sorpasso, a 1962 road movie dripping with dolce vita style.

When it reaches the 1960s, the show grows patchier. Italian design was stellar during this era, but speed-related examples are scarce. A 1969 Olivetti typewriter symbolizes what qualified then for a new-found velocity in communications, while minidresses from Emilio Pucci and Missoni sneak into the show on the dubious grounds of their swerving, abstract patterns. A room dedicated to the flashing graphics of the 1960s Kinetic Art movement serves only to remind us that its finest exponents — Jean Tinguely and Alexander Calder — came from elsewhere.

The Italy of the '70s and '80s seems to have offered even less in the way of speed, unless the turnover rate of its governments counts. By showcasing the equipment used by Carlo Rubbia, the exhibition provides an interesting — though less than pertinent — reminder that Italy has produced a Nobel-winning particle physicist. And the bulky fax machines, computers and cell phones featured from the 1980s seem largely irrelevant.

So, as fascinating as the show is, the concept of speed ultimately loses momentum. Small wonder, perhaps, given that the two most important Italian art movements of the second half of the 20th century, Arte Povera and Transavanguardia, were the antithesis of all things speedy: the former championed the use of humble, often recycled materials while the latter marked a return to painting after it fell out of fashion during the postmodern art movements of the '60s and '70s. And surely it is no mere cultural accident that Italy's biggest recent contribution to the international Zeitgeist is Carlo Petrini's Slow Food movement.

The exhibition's final section, "1990-2010, the Speed of the Future," showcases little more than a handful of high-end cars, a project for an Internet network that will operate like an omniscient global calculator, an advanced radar satellite technology and a simulator for Italy's high-speed train. Seen alongside the wealth of objects from previous decades, this is a deflating measure of Italy's uninspiring present tense. Yet the very success of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, which is rapidly building a reputation for thoughtfully curated exhibitions, is cause for good cheer — as this exhibition shows, Italy may have lost speed, but it still has a gift for delighting in the finer things in life.

• RACHEL SPENCE/ROME
• A show in Rome celebrates art and technology inspired by Italy's passion for speed