KISS OF THE SPIDER

Prestige travels to the Italian island of Sardinia to drive Ferrari's latest convertible. It goes without saying we're infatuated. Instantly.

- JON WALL

It's just after eight in the morning and the sun has already climbed high in the cloudless Mediterranean sky. Ahead of me, through the windscreen, the road - mercifully almost entirely free of other traffic - snakes enticingly along a deeply indented coastline, from which a deep blue sea stretches away to the horizon and, beyond that, the northern coast of Africa. Even forgetting the vehicle I'm sitting in, it's the kind of scene I fantasise about whenever I ease myself into the driving seat. But the car - oh my lord, the car. I've been behind the wheel for only 15 minutes, but it's already crystal clear that Ferrari's new Roma Spider, which I've flown to the Italian island of Sardinia to spend the next few hours throwing around on these blissfully deserted byways, verges on the sublime.

Some cars flatter to deceive, but the Roma Spider looks so perfect, so exquisite, that you know even without driving it: it's going to blow you away.

Of course, it has provenance. When, almost exactly four years ago, Ferrari whipped the wraps off its then-new Roma - appropriately in the heart of the city it was named after the coupe was hailed as representing a return to the elegance of the 1950s and early-'60s, a time when the stars of Italian cinema, such as Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni and Gina Lollobrigida, were in every way as glamorous as those of Hollywood.