di GianLuca Pellegrini Ferdinand Piëch, president of Volkswagen, has described it as a “return to origins”. Without adding anything else. A laconicism explicable only in part by the obvious confidentiality with which any executive must treat his own products that are not due out for another two years. The truth is that effectively the German top manager only had to throw out a remark to sum up to perfection the spirit, content and – let us say – philosophical, approach to the “New Beetle”, the next saloon car to come from the Wolfsburg motor works. Because the “New Beetle” was desired, engineered and designed to be the spiritual heir, if not actually the clone, of the car known in Italy as the 'Maggiolino’ (in the masculine, against the advice of the purists, but suggested by habit); of what is, in other words the most famous, longest-lived and most manufactured car – some 25 million of them, with the figure rising daily, for it is still in production – in automobile history. And, better to stress the descendancy, it is also christened, for the car which in Italy has always been called the ‘Maggiolino’ was in fact known on theAnglophile markets as the Beetle.