Vittorio David Di Nepi was driving toward the Mainarde, between Lazio and Molise, passed through Picinisco and saw the threshold. In the city, SUVs that cut the view. In the alleys, little Pandas perched everywhere. From that day he photographed them. The Instagram page @pandinineipaesini — little Pandas in little towns — has 138,000 followers. Many send the pictures themselves. There is now a book: Pandini nei paesini. Un atlante sentimentale a misura di Panda, Salani, 224 pages, 14.90 euros. Repubblica wrote it on 17 October. It is not a new-model launch. It is an atlas of dents.

Fiat put the Panda out in 1980. The ad: a family with cases, newlyweds dropping the seats, a newborn in a sling, a farmer with crates and demijohns. The voice: “Sir, you are the first to buy a truly great car.” Di Nepi: if the 500 is La Dolce Vita, the Panda is life. The budget car of working Italy in the 80s and 90s, and, in part, still. VDnews says the page started in February 2016. About 50 photographs a week, peaks in summer, at Christmas, in snow, at village feasts. He looks for context, a person beside the car, paint jobs, impossible parking.

In Rutigliano, Puglia, a red Panda Young is a fruit stall, the bonnet open like a hanging garden. In Scanello, in the Bolognese Apennines, the inner roof is Van Gogh’s Starry Night. In Maranello, one sits at the Ferrari gate. Jurassic Park dinosaurs on the flanks. Maradona on the doors, over the Gulf of Naples. A message: Geomobile, 30 years with a surveyor, the name on the boot, all Dronero knows it, “that surveyor is my dad.” Another, retired in Italy, ended in The Gambia on a volunteer mission. Di Nepi’s favourite: “Rescue for Impassable Terrain.”

He fears, he said, that he feeds the tourist postcard of the borgo. Then: however voyeur it is to look at a Panda beside old men on Monobloc chairs, the car, with its dings, makes the scene real. One picture is missing: a 1996 Panda of his cousin, who took him to wash it at a fountain by a newsstand. The cousin is gone. “Perhaps the car packed with the comics she bought me was the real engine.”

This is not a showroom cult. It is a village cult, an Instagram cult, a pocket-book cult. Anyone who wants glossy Italy has the 500. Anyone who wants Italy that still parks crooked has the Panda. The followers are not buying a model. They are sending a street.

Di Nepi did not invent the car. He invented a file of images. Salani bound it. Until the next shot from Picinisco, the atlas sits on paper and on the phone.

Image: Damian B Oh, a Fiat Panda Young 141, 23 June 2023, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The photograph shows a Panda Young, not a shot from the book.

Sources consulted: Pandinineipaesini, the Instagram account celebrating Fiat Panda — la Repubblica; Un profilo Instagram celebra il mito della Panda — D la Repubblica.