How do you find the lone resident of an Italian ghost town? In a purple Lamborghini.
After a journey of nearly 500 miles along most of the length of Italy, we reach the village of Roscigno Vecchia without its most famous (and sole) inhabitant. He seems to have fled even farther.
This story originally appeared in Volume 11 of Road & Track.
This is a different take on the Lamborghini drive story. The first Miura had barely rolled out of the factory in Sant’Agata before journalists were taking the new company’s cars to scenic towns and villages, photographing them in pretty piazzas surrounded by admiring crowds. Although this Urus was never short of fans each time we stopped, our idea was for a lonelier adventure, inspired by both the theme of escape and the Lambo SUV’s ability to go where its predecessors could not.
Italy, with its shifting demographics and susceptibility to natural disasters, is probably the best place in the world for those seeking scenic dereliction and photogenic ruins. The Urus’s journey south barely missed the most famous of these, the city of Pompeii, which was entombed in volcanic ash following an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. But there are many others, especially in the south, where economically driven depopulation has been a constant trend since the mid-19th century. Many who stepped ashore at Ellis Island started out hereabouts.
Roscigno Vecchia—Old Roscigno—is deep within Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park in the region of Campania, about 20 miles inland from where the toe of Italy’s boot starts to head away from the heel. The village was abandoned in the middle of the 20th century. The official historic reasons were landslides and a malaria outbreak. But an equally strong motivator was likely the proximity of the much nicer Roscigno Nuovo—New Roscigno—which sits atop a neighboring hill.
Left to ruin, Roscigno Vecchia has become almost impossibly scenic, especially in the sun of an early spring morning. Photographer Amy Shore and I arrive to find something that looks like it was created by a set designer rather than random chance. Many buildings have tumbled into piles of rubble, while others have lost walls and roofs. Some sit balanced like endgame Jenga puzzles, sporting cracks and gaps that make it seem impossible for them to still be standing upright. Despite all of this, the fountain is still flowing, and the noise of the trickling water mixes with the cooing of pigeons from inside the slumping structures.
Apart from a wandering flock of sheep, there are no inhabitants to be seen. As this is meant to be a story about escape, not extinction, we’ll have to come back later.
When the Uruswas launched, many loudly wondered whether it would ever be accepted as a true Lamborghini. Five years of hindsight and sales success have categorically answered that question, turning Lamborghini into an SUV maker with a sideline in supercars. The point is made when we pick up the car at the factory in Sant’Agata. The calmness in the halls where the Huracán and the Aventador are produced at entirely artisanal rates starkly contrasts with the bustle in the much more modern Urus building. While the output of most car factories is typically finished in shades of black, white, silver, and gray, it’s pleasing to see that the lines of Uruses awaiting delivery to customers are a riot of exuberant color.
Purple is a bold look for any car, especially a 4850-pound SUV, but it gives our borrowed Urus the star power of a blue supergiant. Feedback from the many spectators it draws during our journey south is overwhelmingly positive. Outside the immediate environs of Bologna, Lamborghini will never be regarded as the nation’s home team, but if there are no Ferraris nearby, then ogling will happen. Exotic cars are rare in Italy, where taxes are assessed through a byzantine formula based around emissions and horsepower. The exact figure varies by region, but a Urus’s 641 hp commands a rating of at least $8000 at current exchange rates. And that’s due every year.
Yet for those who can afford it, the Urus doesn’t just deliver an appropriate level of visual vaffanculo; it also sounds and drives like a Lamborghini should. While a Huracán or an Aventador would be much lighter and more agile, you don’t need to go deep into Lamborghini’s back catalog to find supercars the Urus could out-handle. The Miura, the Countach, and the Diablo—definitely. Despite its six-foot eyeline, the Urus turns in more eagerly and finds more grip, and its huge carbon-ceramic brakes shed speed with greater assurance. Is it faster over a mountain road than a Murciélago? Possibly.
Giuseppe Spagnuolo is the sole resident of Roscigno Vecchia, a village in southern Italy that was abandoned decades ago.
Amy Shore
The sinuous route SS166 that takes us the final few miles to Roscigno would be a fun arena for the contest. Long, sweeping corners suit the Urus best, with active anti-roll and torque-biasing differential working to hide its mass. It deals with rapid direction changes less well; quick-fire left-right-left combos make it feel like a flabby prizefighter. Its exhaust note is clearly one of eight cylinders rather than 12, and its twin-turbocharged engine is less willing to rev than its sonorous ancestors. But there is no lack of performance or theater, the Urus popping and banging on a lifted throttle. Beneath the surface, its mechanical relationship to the Porsche Cayenne and the Bentley Bentayga is intimate, but it feels much wilder than either. Also, the elaborately over-spec control lever for personalized dynamic modes is labeled Ego. Could any other automaker get away with that?
A chance encounter with slower traffic as we get close to Roscigno proves the Urus’s otherworldliness. We catch up with a panel van that is being held up by a Fiat Panda (the original boxy one), the supermini moving no faster than 30 mph. Barely two lanes wide, the twisting road is divided by a solid painted line that prohibits passing.
The van quickly loses patience and, on a straight that definitely isn’t long enough for the maneuver, lumbers past in a cloud of diesel fumes, revealing that the now-unobscured Panda has a light on its roof and wears the livery of Italy’s carabinieri paramilitary police force. We trundle behind the law for a few more turns, until the urge to follow the van’s example becomes overwhelming (the food in Italian jails must be pretty good, right?). The two officers barely glance over as the Urus surges past in a wave of sound and fury.
After finding our destination deserted, we follow the Italian playbook and head off in search of lunch. We find it in a slightly less empty village nearby, at a tiny trattoria where Shore and I are the only customers and the menu is all of the proprietor’s choosing. Pasta, dessert, drinks, and coffee cost us about $30. An hour’s drive away on the fashionable Amalfi Coast, where Lamborghinis go for real, it would be easy to spend five times as much and not eat this well. The Urus, parked outside the restaurant, draws a crowd, mostly teenagers who want to stand next to it and take selfies. Then it’s time to head back to Roscigno Vecchia to see whether the man who wasn’t there isn’t there again. The Urus bounces along the dirt track leading to the village without complaint, an excuse to try its off-road Terra mode. A Huracán STO wouldn’t have made it here with its underbody intact. On arriving, we see that little has changed beyond shifting shadows. But, crucially, one thing has. Next to a shuttered church, a figure now lies on a stone bench, snoozing in the sun. The arrival of the Lamborghini, exhaust snarling through its Akrapovič silencer, wakes him.
This is Giuseppe Spagnuolo—Roscigno Vecchia’s unofficial mayor, the abandoned village’s best known attraction, and the man we’ve come all this way to meet. He spent most of his life in Roscigno Nuovo, then moved here in 1997 after the breakup of his marriage, choosing to make his home in a small upstairs apartment overlooking the main square. Now 74, he has lived here ever since, existing on food he gathers and grows himself on a small allotment and gifts brought by family and the increasing number of visitors drawn to meet him.
Conversation is, initially, a challenge. Giuseppe speaks almost no English, and my Italian doesn’t run much beyond the basics required for ordering pizza and beer, let alone the intricacies of local dialect. Despite this, he is more than happy to show us around, posing for pictures against scenic backdrops and cracking a smile when I say he looks like Ernest Hemingway. His English-speaking son, Gianfranco, soon arrives and improves on my attempts to translate hand gestures.
Giuseppe’s life is a simple one. He washes in the fountains, feeds the village’s stray cats, and has lived without electricity since it was cut off a decade ago, likely due to his inability to pay the bills. He reckons that he lives on the equivalent of less than a couple of dollars a day, much of which is likely spent on tobacco for his Dickensian pipe. Beyond occasional trips to Roscigno Nuovo to see his family or visit a bar, he rarely leaves. “COVID didn’t change anything for him,” Gianfranco explains, despite Italy having some of the harshest restrictions in Europe. “Nobody came here, but he didn’t notice.”
A local museum trust is attempting to restore parts of the village, or at least halt the decline, but seems to be fighting a losing battle. “Every day something falls down,” Giuseppe says with a wistful look toward some of the teetering ruins, “but I will always live here.”
What does he think of the Urus? He glances at this exotic visitor with all the curiosity he would give a small Fiat before delivering several sentences of what I suspect is an unflattering verdict. “He says that he likes the color,” Gianfranco says diplomatically. “But he cannot drive. He has never owned a car.” When I tell him the price—this car, optioned, is somewhere around the €300,000 mark (that’s about $325,000)—he just shrugs. It is outside his frame of reference.
We leave Roscigno Vecchia supremely impressed with the austere dignity of its gentlemanly inhabitant, yet also enamored of the brutish charms of the supreme example of Italian ostentation that brought us here. It’s a two-and-a-half-ton SUV, but it’s also a true Lamborghini.
Keyword: Exploring an Italian Ghost Town in a Lamborghini Urus