I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. And I think I like Italian cars. From the 40’s to the 60’s. So I googled Italian car design and got a couple of sources from Road and Track and MotorTrend that might explain why........
“Style is part of the bedrock of Italian culture. There’s a philosophy, fare bella figura. Directly translated, it means “to make a good figure”; in practice, it’s more like, “make an effort to be noticed” or “nail the first impression.” This is the nation that took something as universal as an evening stroll and elevated it to la passeggiata, a daily ritual of well-dressed, leisurely flaunting and flirting. “Just holding a pencil in this country makes you feel more creative,” says Bangle, BMW’s chief designer.

The culture is also permeated by a reverence for aesthetics. “I think [Italians] have respected art and design probably longer than any other country,” says Callum, vice president of design at Ford. Early in his career, Callum worked at the Ford-owned design house Carrozzeria Ghia in Turin. He felt a major cultural difference almost immediately: In Italy, his chosen career held a place of honor that he’d never experienced growing up in Scotland. “Being an industrial designer in the U.K. is not seen as a really high, important job,” he says. “Whereas I think in Italy, they see the art side of life as being very, very important. I think that element of where you are in society really helps.”

It goes back generations. Italy’s carrozzerie, independent styling houses that designed and built bespoke automotive bodywork, grew from a tradition of horse-and-buggy coachbuilding. Trace the craft even further, and you end up in the Middle Ages, when Turin had a reputation for turning out the world’s most beautiful and stylish suits of armor.

“Metalworking has always been a primary craft there,” says Peter Stevens, designer of the McLaren F1 (and dozens of other cars). In his current role, teaching at London’s Royal College of Art, he emphasizes how Italy’s past helped to elevate the work of coachbuilding and, eventually, car design. “Unlike in other countries where metalworkers were seen as… the grumpy guys at the end of the village that you wouldn’t want your daughter to marry, in Italy that was seen as a really stylish thing that a family would be very proud of,” he says.

Thus was born the glorious 1945-'75 period when Italian car design came to lead the world in terms of aspirational vehicles. Today the greatest Italian design houses are either pale, foreign-owned shadows of what they once were or merely sub-brand names, like Ghia or Vignale, or even worse — like Bertone — gone forever.
We summed up the declining Italian era: "People will always remember the great works of Pininfarina, Nuccio Bertone, Luigi Segre of Ghia, and the great creators they employed, but the passion, the drive, the intensity has gone. We can regret, lament, celebrate the past, but there is no foreseeable future for Italian car design." Since then, we've seen magnificent new Ferrari and Maserati models, even an attainable Alfa Romeo two-seater, so it seemed not just reasonable but also necessary to take another close look at what's happening in Italy. Yes, Fiat is inconsequential, Alfa Romeo is near death, and Lancia barely exists. But Leonardo da Vinci's creative spirit has lived in Italy for centuries and, as we have pleasantly confirmed, hasn't yet disappeared.

[size=13px]As to why the era of style, form, and function ended, some say Socialism....and [/size]If you put these data together, the picture that emerges is that of a country with a large economy and very good potential but burdened by a high public debt -legacy of excessive spending in the past decades- and slow growth, which is in turn due to a combination of unfavorable demographics and several structural issues (high taxes, inefficient bureaucracy, widespread corruption etc.). Also if you look at Debt/GDP ratio, Italy is the 4th worst country (after Japan, Lebanon and Greece) at around 132%

Or just maybe Socialists can’t ever make a decent Mona Lisa.