Stresa is a town on Lake Maggiore, north-west of Milan. It has big old hotels on the waterfront, boats out to the Borromean Islands, and a mountain behind it called the Mottarone. A private road runs up the mountain to the summit at almost 1,500 metres.

Last week around eighty-five cars drove up that road for an event called Tutto Bene Hill Climb. One of them was our 1964 Ford Falcon Sprint.

Tutto Bene is a hillclimb where nobody is timed. You drive up, you drive down, you drive up again. There are no results. The motto is "Slow down to go fast". The Italian automobile club had to register it as something, so it went with Dimostrazione Atipica Sperimentale: an experimental, atypical demonstration.

It was started in 2024 by BorromeoDeSilva, a design studio in Milan, together with Race Service, a creative agency in Los Angeles. This year was the third edition. It runs over two days. The first has nothing to do with driving. People walked round the gardens of Villa Pallavicino, took boats across the lake, then had dinner on Isola Madre.

The road winds nine kilometres through the woods, with the lake showing now and then between the trees. It is private, owned by the Borromeo family, who also own the islands below. Most days anyone can use it for a small toll.

On a normal weekend that means cyclists and families out for a drive. Last week it meant a Ferrari F40, a Porsche Carrera GT, a BMW M1 Procar and a Gordon Murray T.50. Genesis drove two concept cars in public for the first time. The rest were classics, restomods, rally cars. A Ford Falcon is not the obvious choice for that line-up.

The Falcon originally came out as a 1960 model. Ford sold it as a "compact", economical car, which in America at the time meant one that was only about 4.6 metres long. Over half a million were sold in the first year. Later it got a V8 and the name Sprint. In the sixties Ford took V8 Falcons rallying in the Alps in winter, where they set the fastest times on the mountain stages. So there is some history behind taking one up an Italian mountain. We don't know how fast ours went. Nobody timed it.

The Falcon wasn't our only car, by the way. We also brought a Meyers Manx beach buggy and a Chrysler Town & Country. And our new helmet bag, in a limited edition made just for Tutto Bene. If you weren't there, the bag is now in our shop in two versions.