The story of Matteo Preziosi and his connection with the past.
A passion that starts as a child and goes on for a lifetime. Because the charm of the past is enshrined in vintage objects. Whether cars or various articles, that is where memories, passions and dreams live on. We grow up finding objects that in the future can become part of a unique collection. And this is what happened to Matteo Preziosi, lover of classic cars and objects.
This passion was first born when he was about 10 years old, watching America in the 1950s and 1960s. “I was attracted to iconic objects from TV shows. I remember Hazzard, or Kitt, the black car from Supercar, the jukeboxes from Happy Days and more generally the America of those years,” Matteo Preziosi recounted. A love for the past and its iconic objects that comes from the very beginning and today he is a true collector. Time leads the way: and while Preziosi used to travel and shop at local markets for pennies, posters and newspapers, today he collects more important objects, thanks to his greater spending power. Thus, come jukeboxes, pinball machines and vintage cars (mainly American), which today find their way among several Lamborghini, another great passion of Matteo Preziosi. His heart, however, looks at the past and actually “the first car was a classic one: a 1969 Ford Mustang, which was a wreck.”
Then comes the love for restoration. Preziosi gets his hands dirty, he loves working on objects, taking care of them and bringing them back to life. He studies the cars he buys, learns about their history, their codes and then, as a self-taught person, he makes them run again on today’s roads. “I love restoring old articles, so today I often find myself buying things and then restoring them. It’s like a beautiful journey that doesn’t care about the destination.” He is not only restoring classic cars, but also other objects that are part of this immense collection, thanks always to his selfacquired electronic and mechanical skills. “I am self-taught, and I know my limits, so when some work goes beyond my capabilities, I entrust the object to others, but I am always there supervising everything,” Preziosi specified.
Thanks to these specific vintage objects that conceal a nostalgic and almost melancholic aura, there is a constant study of the past. But once we get over that first glimpse, we are projected to the future, just like when a child imagines its dreams. Because, in the end, discovering the world through the eyes of a child is something we should all do. A gaze that Matteo always takes with him when he is shopping for his collection. If he used to buy things he liked and on the cheap because he lacked high financial capacity, today things are different and there is also an investment logic that must always live with Matteo’s taste. “I can’t buy something I don’t like, even if after several years I can resell it at a higher price. That’s because I use things in the meantime and I have to be passionate about them,” Preziosi confessed.
In Matteo’s Lugano based collection there are objects that come from different parts of America, and they all have different stories and colors. He has bought cars from private owners, and there are people who contact him because they know that Matteo might be interested in an article they possess. Preziosi never “closes the door on” anything and buys from everyone: private owners, car dealerships and auctions. Even if he is not very interested in the Italian market, he has been investing in Lamborghini cars lately. There are seven cars from the Sant’Agata Bolognese company that have been added to Matteo Preziosi’s vintage collection: these are classic supercars but also cars that have just left the dealership, so they have very few miles. Which car would you like to have? “I would love to have a Lamborghini Miura, the most beautiful sports car of all time.”
