The Great Drives
Gran turismo — the phrase the motor industry borrowed from the Grand Tour, and the older meaning is the better one. Every other collection here is a set of places. This one is a set of roads, on the argument that some geography can only be understood at the speed of a car and in the right order — the corniche that reveals the coast a bend at a time, the pass that explains why two valleys speak different languages, the highway built across water because there was no other way to reach the end.
Gran turismo is a phrase the motor industry borrowed from the Grand Tour in the 1920s, for cars built to cross a continent quickly with luggage. The borrowing was accurate. The original Tour was not a list of cities but an order of arrival, and its whole pedagogy lay in the transitions — the crossing of the Alps, described by every eighteenth-century traveller as an ordeal, taught more about Italy than the first week in Rome.
Every other collection in this atlas is a set of places. This one is a set of roads, on the argument that some geography can only be read at driving speed and in sequence.
Three kinds of road do it. The corniche reveals a coast one bend at a time and cannot be understood from either end: the Amalfi road, the Grande Corniche above Monaco, Highway One through Big Sur, where landslides close the route most years and residents treat it as a condition of living there. The pass explains why two valleys speak different languages, and the tunnel that replaced it — Mont Blanc, fifteen minutes instead of a season — changed both towns at its ends. And the built crossing exists because there was no other way: the Overseas Highway running a hundred and thirteen miles over open water, the Karakoram climbing to 4,693 metres at the highest paved border on earth.
None of these is a distance between two points. Each is an argument about a landscape, made at thirty miles an hour.