R4. Da Billancourt a Via Caetani

That front face aroused sympathy. But perhaps it concealed its true essence. A rear end equipped with a large hatchback with an extended platform to facilitate loading. When the Renault 4, known as Marie Chantal, debuted in the Grand Palais in Paris, they said it would be everyone’s car. And that amaranth-coloured R4, the Export model, bought in 1971 by Filippo Bartoli, became everyone’s. From the moment when, on 9 May 1978, after 253,839 kilometres, it stopped breathing along with the body it carried. He was the most important man in Italy. She the best-selling car in France. She had been born in Billancourt, the Parisian factory that had modelled the face of a nation. The Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, the photographer Robert Doisneau, the philosopher Simone Weil, the songwriter Georges Brassens and even Gusztáv Sebes, the coach of Great Hungary, had worked in its workshops. But not only them. Within those plants, sprouted in the garden of Louis Renault’s mother, other existences had moved, destined to cross two world wars, the Cold War, Sixty-Eight, the economic crisis and the armed struggle. Following that very long thread that links an origin to an epilogue, line after line Piero Trellini drags us on an incredible journey, inside a story that must be seen from below, where it is the car headlights that guide us. Along the way, everything connects. The thoughts of Henry Ford, Adolf Hitler, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Clare Boothe Luce, George Marshall, Eduardo De Filippo, George Patton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Le Corbusier, Giangiacomo and Inge Feltrinelli, Sandro Pertini, Renato Curcio, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Henry Kissinger, Paolo VI, Aldo Moro and many others chase each other. It will be the slow transformation of their heads, through an invisible chain of links, that will deflect history, leading that car and those thoughts to breathe the same air and undertake the same journey. To find themselves, in the last sensational pages, overlapping and coinciding within the most dramatic of coordinates.