Zen and My Journey to the Targa Florio

I keep coming back to this photograph of Ferdinando Latteri and Nino Todaro in a Porsche 906 at the 1970 Targa Florio, maybe because I am building my own car now to drive those same Sicilian roads this October, and maybe because the picture seems to hold something I have been reaching for without ever quite being able to say it.

The car is enough to stop me. Any man who has spent enough years around machines knows that feeling. You see a car like that and the first response is immediate, physical almost. The line of it is so settled, so free of excess, that it gives the impression of having been answered rather than designed. But what keeps me in the photograph is the way the car still lives inside the world around it. The road has not been turned into a backdrop. The town has not been emptied out for the sake of the image. The people standing there are close enough to change the whole feeling of the scene. Nothing has been made safe by distance. The car is still moving through a place where life is going on, and because of that the photograph carries more than beauty. It carries the feeling of a world still joined to itself.

That is where Latteri and Todaro begin to matter to me. I know they are part of the record of that race, and I know the car itself brings its own weight to the image, but what stays with me is the fact that these were two men who went to Sicily together and entered that road as something lived rather than observed. When I look at the photograph, I do not feel that they are standing apart from the place or somehow raised above it by history. They seem held inside it. The road, the village, the crowd, the old pressure of the day, all of it closes around them in the right way. That is why the image does not feel dead to me. It still carries the warmth and pressure of human life.

I think that closeness is what turns me toward my own car so quickly. I do not feel the need to measure what I am building against their Porsche. It is more that the same pull runs through both. My car comes to this road without the kind of history that asks to be respected on sight. If it ever has weight, it will have to come from the life inside it, from what it took to keep building when building stopped making easy sense, from the years of carrying something because it felt right before it felt sensible. That is a different kind of inheritance, but it is still an inheritance. A man makes it with his time.

The older I get, the less I believe that the value of a road like the Targa Florio can be settled by outcome. I am not going there to win anything. What draws me there does not live in that kind of language. Some places gather a man back into himself. They narrow the distance between what he loves, what he is willing to work for, and the life he is actually living. They do not flatter him. They make him pay attention. That is where Zen begins to mean something to me in all of this. The plain, difficult act of entering the thing itself. Staying with what is in front of you long enough that the usual split between your thoughts and your life begins to give way. A road like the Targa Florio seems capable of doing that. It pulls a man out of abstraction and back toward reality, until the ground under him, the village around him, the sound of the car, and the fact of other people standing there all start to feel like part of the same truth.

A place like the Targa Florio once drew people together around something they recognized as worth their attention. Men drove, certainly, and men built, but men also stood at the roadside and watched with the kind of seriousness that tells you they knew what was passing in front of them. It was part of the place. That is what I feel in the photograph, and it is also what I find myself wanting now with greater force than I would have admitted years ago. I want the right people around the right things. I want a life in which what I care about is not floating free, disconnected from place, from labor, and from others who know the same pull.

By the time my car reaches Sicily, if it reaches Sicily, it will be carrying much more than fabrication and design. It will be carrying the years that made it possible, the uncertainty, the cost, the stubbornness, the days when carrying on felt like the only honest thing left to do. That changes a car. It means enough life has gone into it that bringing it to the road feels like the right ending to the work.

So when I think about taking my own car there this October, the journey I feel in front of me is about more than the drive. I want the road, certainly. I want Sicily. I want the car in motion and the strange rightness of hearing it in the place I have imagined it for so long. But what I want even more is to step into a world where what I love, what I have been building, and the people I am meant to find no longer feel so far apart. That is the world I keep seeing in the photograph, and that is the world I want to move toward, not only for myself, but because it feels worth making more room for in the life I have left.