Black paint, cream leather, silver five-spoke wheels, yellow calipers. Parked nose-out in a public lot with the roof up, which is how most of these actually live. The Portofino is the car people point at and call “the small Ferrari,” and that description has been wrong since roughly 2018.

The lineage here starts with the 2008 California, which arrived carrying more firsts than any Ferrari of its decade: first front-mid-engined V8, first seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox, first multi-link rear suspension, and the first retractable hardtop the factory ever built. Purists hated it on sight. The roof mechanism added mass. The proportions were awkward from certain angles. The rear end looked like it had been designed by a different department, because in a sense it had been. And it sold in numbers Maranello had not seen before, largely to people who had never owned a Ferrari at all.

The Ferrari 308 GTS does not require a good photograph to look like what it is. It requires only sufficient light and a clear line of sight, and the rest follows inevitably from the Pininfarina body and the Maranello badge. The photograph taken somewhere below Taormina — the white hotel building visible on the hill above, the bougainvillea erupting in deep magenta from the volcanic rock, the cypresses marking the sky — provides considerably more than sufficient conditions, and the result is the strongest image produced by this Sicilian rally and possibly the best argument for the event’s existence.

The Ferrari Roma Spider solved a problem that convertible GT cars have struggled with for decades: how to remove the roof without materially degrading either the driving experience or the visual coherence of the closed car. Ferrari’s retractable hardtop — which deploys or retracts in 13.5 seconds at speeds up to 60 km/h — preserves the Roma Coupe’s rear proportions sufficiently that the Spider does not look like a convertible that wishes it were a coupe. It looks like a car designed to be driven open, which is what it is.

The debate between 275 GTB purists — those who insist the long-nose, alloy-bodied, six-carburettor 275 GTB/4 is the definitive expression — and those who prefer the earlier short-nose car’s proportions has the quality of all good automotive arguments: it is about something real, it produces no consensus, and both sides have valid points that the other side acknowledges while refusing to concede. The market has taken a position by valuing the /4 variant substantially above the earlier car, but market valuations reflect consensus rather than correctness.

If the 250 GTO was Ferrari building a racing car with a license plate, the 250 GT Lusso was Ferrari building a road car with no ambiguity about its purpose. The Lusso — Gran Turismo Lusso, grand touring luxury — was a car for the owner who wanted to drive from Milan to Monaco in the morning and attend the casino in the evening, and who expected the machine doing this to be as beautiful as anything else in either city.

Thirty-six cars were built. Every one of them is accounted for. Every one of them has a documented racing history, a chain of ownership that collectors and lawyers have traced with forensic precision, and a market value that has periodically set the record for the most expensive automobile ever sold at auction. The 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO is the car around which the collector market has constructed its most elaborate mythology, and the car whose actual driving experience most owners are too cautious about resale implications to describe honestly.