Photograph: Alamy
Italian journalist Luigi Barzini remembered the unexpected welcome he received in Russian villages east of the Ural Mountains in 1907. Peasant women spat in his direction, and made what he described as “strange signs of exorcism.” This treatment had to do with the mysterious contraption Barzini and his companions used to pass through the villages. It was a motorcar – an Itala, to be exact – and its occupants were heading on an extraordinary endeavor, an 8,000-mile race from Beijing, then called Peking by those in the west, to Paris. With Prince Scipione Borghese directing progress, aided by his chauffeur Ettore Guizzardi and Barzini, the Itala had been comfortably pacing the field as it motored toward the Urals.
At the time, the future of the car seemed in doubt. It was widely viewed as a luxury item that paled in comparison to the horse as a means of transport. Driving a car from Asia to Europe seemed madness given the scarcity of roads, much less good roads – to one newspaper, the Peking-Paris seemed as improbable as sending humans to the moon via telegraph. Yet the eventual winner, Prince Borghese, proved that the race could be completed – and so did the international rivals he left in the dust, including a memorable French conman named Charles Godard and his Dutch-made Spyker. The Peking-Paris helped usher in the age of the automobile, a radical change of society at all levels that we’re still grappling with today, as examined in a new book by British author Kassia St Clair, The Race to the Future: 8,000 Miles to Paris.
