On the night of 25 February 1903, what should have been a routine car journey for Giacomo Puccini and his family abruptly turned nasty. The composer had been in Lucca, Tuscany, that day for a medical appointment, and was returning to his villa in Torre del Lago, about 20 miles away. With him were his partner Elvira, their son Antonio and a chauffeur.
Four miles out of Lucca, in frosty, foggy conditions, their vehicle veered off the road and rolled 15 yards down an embankment. The car flipped over, pinning Puccini underneath but throwing the other passengers clear. Elvira and Antonio escaped with minor injuries, and the driver broke his thigh.
It took eight months for him to recover fully
Puccini himself, however, was less fortunate. He was nearly asphyxiated by petrol fumes, his right shin was severely fractured and it took eight months for him to recover fully. Had it not been
for the prompt arrival of a local doctor, he might easily have perished, and operas including Madam Butterfly and La fanciulla del West would never have been written.
As it was, the 44-year-old Puccini was already the composer of Manon Lescaut, La bohème and Tosca when the car crash happened, and their huge success had brought him considerable riches. He had not been slow in spending his money, developing a taste for dandyish clothing and a penchant for acquiring the latest, state-of-the-art vehicles which a fledgling motor industry had begun producing.
Speeding tickets... and a celebrity petrolhead
A De Dion-Bouton 5 CV was the first car that he purchased, for the then princely sum of 3,800 lira. Puccini’s driving was apparently ‘fast’ by the standards of the day, and he picked up several tickets for speeding through the streets at the outrageous rate of 20-30 miles per hour.
Once it had bitten, Puccini’s automobile bug developed exponentially. Among the purchases he made in years to come were models by Clément-Bayard, Sizaire-Naudin, Fiat, La Buire and Isotta Fraschini. Over a two-decade period, he bought at least 15 new vehicles, seemingly unable to resist the successive blandishments of sleeker, faster models. Such was Puccini's reputation as a celebrity petrolhead that at one point he even featured on the cover of the Italian Automobile Club’s in-house magazine, as poster-boy for a feature entitled ‘Motoring and Art’.
Puccini and the birth of the SUV
Puccini also played a largely unheralded role in the development of what we nowadays call the SUV, or sports utility vehicle. He famously enjoyed hunting and wanted a more robust vehicle to transport him over rough terrain in search of prey. So he commissioned Vincenzo Lancia, the Italian car maker, to build him a bespoke off-road model with a reinforced frame and ‘clawed’ wheels. Puccini paid a staggering 35,000 lira for it, and was apparently delighted.
So delighted, in fact, that he made further purchases from Lancia. In the Lancia Trikappa torpedo, a car capable of 80 miles per hour, Puccini made a 1,200-mile round trip in 1922 through Europe. Two years later, he upgraded to a Lancia Lambda and used it for relaxation as he laboured on his final opera, Turandot. ‘Now I am waiting for poets to send me the verses,’ he wrote. ‘Luckily, I have
my Lambda’.
Nineteen years after the crash, Puccini made a 1,200-mile round trip through Europe
The Lambda was the last car that Puccini purchased, and it transported him to Pisa station for a trip to Brussels in November 1924. He died in the Belgian capital three weeks later, aged 65, of complications following surgery for throat cancer. Act Three of Turandot lay unfinished, but had it not been for his fortuitous escape from the car crash 21 years earlier, this late Puccini masterpiece would never even have been started.