When we need to describe ourselves,
we do it by saying, "I am an artisan."
It means I don't have a job. I am my job.
I think this is what characterizes someone who does what he loves.
I am a bending machine operator.
It's something I wanted to do.
I still do it.
There's still so much to learn,
because the shapes and lines are very complex.
I still do it with the same joy as when I started. It still thrills me.
My father, Alfredo, founded this company with courage and grit.
In 1959, after a short internship,
he decided to open his own business,
because he didn't accept
a very hard reprimand he had received.
Initially, he asked some suppliers if they could lend him the material.
He didn't know how he would return this material,
but thanks to his courage,
he managed to offer some small repairs
that eventually became much bigger repairs.
When he started restoring historic cars, he had an intuition.
He gathered a group of excellent professionals
who had lost their jobs in custom-build car factories in Milan.
Those were plants that had shut down.
He immediately became friends with a great bending machine operator
who worked for the Touring body shop, Stefano Bellini.
This man was over 70 years old when he met my father.
At that age, he decided to start over.
So, he contacted his old suppliers, his old toolmakers, his old students,
and thanks to his precious collaboration,
we put together a team of people who used to work for these companies.
I'm talking about Touring, Zagatto,
Colli, Castagna body shops.
Very important Milanese body shops in the automotive sector worldwide.
I recall that when I was a teen,
it was not easy to love this job.
Because you're working on cars you don't desire in that moment.
You see rather old cars with a style you don't immediately understand.
And I guess one of the secrets is:
the charm of these cars is revealed very slowly as you work on them.
When you finish a restoration, one of the best moments is
the final satisfaction of using it and all,
but it's also a sad goodbye
when the car leaves to even another continent.
Many ask us what is so nice about bending a sheet of metal.
There's the satisfaction of creation.
And it's very different from repair.
I remember that one of my father's most beautiful professional moments
was when engineer Bianchi Anderloni,
whom we had invited to be a sort of consultant
on the outcome of a sheet metal job performed on an Aston Martin DB5 front,
ran his hands over the front of the car, looked at my father,
and said it was perfect.
At that moment-- and the thought of it touches me--
Bianchi Anderloni remembered tactile information
of how the car was made.
Because they recognized the shapes using their hands.
So, he gave my father his approval,
and my father remembers it as if it were yesterday.
I often need to build a shape
or a template close to a fold.
Very complex things,
like right after the fold, there's a rounded shape.
So, I do some exercises.
I think about it and almost talk to the sheet metal.
And I realize that if you're calm
and think carefully,
it seems like the sheet metal actually talks to you.