How sweet it is, as Jackie Gleason used to say. The Italians had the expression as ‘la dolce vita’ long before the Great One graced the airwaves, though, with Fellini cementing the expression as the title of his bittersweet bit of satiric celluloid from 1960, which concerns a callow young man’s Roman odyssey as he travels in search of happiness.

As a vehicle for the journey, the new Ferrari Roma looks like joy in motion. It also carries a great deal of Ferrari history with it, and Italian history too—specifically the history of the great city, and as an homage reveals to the rest of the world just how important Rome is to Italians, and how it is considered the city where spiritual and cultural roads meet.

Ferrari links the Roma to the ‘carefree’ style of life that ‘characterized Rome in the 1950s and 60s’. The idea of life in Italy in the postwar period as ‘carefree’ is a fantasy, of course, one that Fellini skewered in his neo-realist satire of nearly sixty years ago. But, then, a Ferrari is also a fantasy, and driving one neatly circumvents the mechanism of satire.

The Roma’s engine is a 3.9L V8 that can produce up to 612 horsepower and 560 lb-ft of torque. It is outfitted with an eight-speed paddle-shift automatic gearbox, and can reach 60 MPH in 3.4 seconds. Top speed is ~200 MPH.

Ferrari hasn’t revealed additional specs for the Roma at this time. All we have is a few images of a model that neatly conflates Ferrari history and the present day. But that’s enough, for now. Because, like any fantasy worth its salt, it’s spectacularly alluring, and leaves us desiring more.