The Enzo Ferrari Memoirs.

The Enzo Ferrari Memoirs: My Terrible Joys (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1963), also published in Italian as Le Mie Gioie Terribili in 1962, is the first memoir of Enzo Ferrari (1898-1988), the founder of Scuderia Ferrari and the most celebrated figure in the history of Italian motorsport. The book is dedicated to Ferrari's son Dino, whose death in 1956 at the age of twenty-four prompted him to write these memoirs, lending the volume a personal grief that underlies its characteristically terse and unsentimental account of a life lived at the intersection of mechanical genius, commercial ambition, and human tragedy. Following the introduction by Stirling Moss, Ferrari traces the high points of his life from a youthful drive over the Abruzzi mountains pursued by wolves and early years with Alfa Romeo to his personal dealings with such figures as Francoise Sagan, pasta baron Pietro Barilla, Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, and pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, alongside his prosecution for manslaughter and negligence following the catastrophic deaths in the 1957 Mille Miglia, producing a memoir that is by turns boastful, elegiac, and revealing. Ferrari was famously reluctant to sign the English translation, reportedly refusing at first on the grounds that it was not the original Italian text, until finally relenting only after considerable persuasion, signing in his trademark mauve felt-tip pen.