"The car seen from the moon": this is the evocative title of the exhibition that the MAUTO – Turin Automobile Museum is organizing until Monday 22 July, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of man's first landing on the surface of the Earth's satellite, which took place on the evening of 20 July 1969, with the American mission of Apollo 11. The exhibition is set up in the "square" of the Turin museum and on Tuesday 16 July, at 21, a special evening is also scheduled (free admission subject to availability), with the projection of precious archive footage on a giant screen presented by the journalist and curator Giosuè Boetto Cohen.
“If to understand a man, a place or a phenomenon – commented Boetto Cohen -, one has to immerse oneself in the time that accompanied them, even a complex object like the car comes from a precise era and went through others before reaching to us. Knowing this journey through the decades opens our eyes to the reasons for a shape, a color, a technical solution. 1969 was, first of all, the year of the Moon, but he was also the child of an era of renewal. Times that influenced society at every level, that prevented it from going back. Times that it is good to remember in the present, so full of unknowns".
The exhibition sees the protagonists, immersed in a lunar environment, surrounded by the most beautiful films from the NASA, Teche RAI and Centro Storico Fiat archives, four cars born in Italy in 1969, which tell "how we were on 4 wheels". These are: FIAT 128, built at a rate of 1800 units per day and the marque's first front-wheel drive car; FIAT 130, a prestigious but also "misunderstood" flagship, which did not give the desired results; Autobianchi A111, whose square shapes and modern mechanics made it avant-garde; Autobianchi A112, created to compete with the Mini, which was extremely successful and was produced for 17 years. To these is added the Chevrolet Corvette: the only foreign car in the exhibition, it was the car driven by the golden era astronauts who received one – not free of charge but rented for the symbolic sum of 1 dollar a year – from a General Motors dealer in Florida.
At the event it is also also present Jeep, which for the occasion is exhibiting 4 models from the current range: Jeep Compass, Jeep Renegade in S trim, Jeep Cherokee and Jeep Grand Cherokee.
In addition to the cars on display, the exhibition aims to celebrate a fundamental historical moment for humanity and tell how the company influenced the customs and habits of Italians, also through the pages of the specialized newspapers of the time and a wide selection of archival images (videos and photos), which tell how the car designers had begun to create prototypes whose futuristic forms were inspired by those of missiles, how advertising was inspired by spatial imagery to develop a new and captivating language, and how travelers became explorers of remote parts of the world, but still accessible at the time.
