Inspired by Filippo and bolstered by traction-computer confidence, I take off, skidding the rear-wheel-drive Ghibli through the cones with cautious, yet increasing grace. In fact, I keep all of the cars in the V8 lineup on track, except for a Quattroporte, which I spin into some deep snow. (Thankfully, no bulldozer was needed.) After more laps, my nerves give way to elation. With practice comes confidence, and with confidence comes speed. Steam billows from the wheels as the hot brakes melt the snow caked inside the rims.

        Around noon, the sun breaks through the clouds. I roll down the driver’s window of a stunning red GranTurismo (equipped with Maserati’s new twin-turbo V6 Nettuno engine) and switch off its traction control. The engine snarls. Chunks of snow fly off the tires and into the car in a cacophonous, visceral thrill ride. Sliding past the Maserati reps near the warming house, I swear I see Filippo raise his eyebrows in approval.

        On a trail near the track, curious cross-country skiers watch, drawn to the plumes of snow and deep reverberation. In the distance, others wait in a lift line. A ski vacation suddenly feels pedestrian, but an après-track lunch at the experimental fine-dining restaurant Al Peršéf, featuring smoked trout, beef tartare, barley soup, and braised veal cheeks, seems just right.

        When I return to Bormio, the rumbling of my Maserati causes a young boy to drag his mom over to see the car. “Maserati, Mamma!” he exclaims, tugging at her arm with all his might. His eyes sparkle. I know just how he feels. Experiences like this confirm that the thrill of driving is alive and well, no matter what powers cars in the future. Perhaps the venue was appropriate. Just as the ice track will eventually melt into the landscape, these engines will also disappear. It’s a thought that gives this particular experience a bittersweet significance. But if these sonorous machines have reached the end of their journey, at least that journey involved roaring through the Italian Alps.

 

        If you’re looking for summer driving adventures sure to thrill, Porsche offers experiences in Sardinia, Southern France, and the Austrian Alps. Alternatively, Canossa leads a grand tour of the Dolomites. For drivers who prefer to explore at their leisure, California’s State Route 33 through Ojai and the storied 1000 Miglia from Brescia to Rome and back are choice routes. Or chart your own course through beautiful driving roads with a Butler Map.

        Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch — the duo behind Roman and Williams, a design studio renowned for creating some of hospitality’s most iconic spaces, including its own acclaimed bar and shop — share five mind-blowing spaces worth traveling around the world to experience.

 

The Hollyhock House, Los Angeles. Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House is a masterpiece of design. The geometry of its layout, of the ornament, and careful trimwork is sublime. It's a unique combination of Japanese and American craftsmen, with enough theatrical drama to be an avant-garde expressionist opera set. It’s also primarily the work of master draftswoman and architect Marion Mahony Griffin, who drew all the plans, renderings, artwork, ornament of the home (and many others) for Wright. She was a genius. At the gift shop, there’s a Frank Lloyd Wright calendar and 11 of the images in it are her exquisite drawings.

 

The Okura Tokyo. The original Hotel Okura opened in the early ’60s and was sadly torn down a few years ago, but its lobby was carefully saved and put back together after an international group of creatives voiced their despair at its potential loss. The lobby is like something from films such as Black Rain or Inception combined with traditional old-school Japanese design on steroids. Best of all, it is for real — even if brought back to life after being destroyed. A beautiful Godzilla? It's a massive room, entirely wood with magnificent sculptural lighting that takes inspiration from cherry blossoms. It has no service; it is simply a massive, warm greeting hall. Perfect polite doormen, smiling coat people, and the largest ikebana floral display we, or you, have ever seen greet you, typically surrounded by beautiful, extravagant traditional Japanese wedding parties. Ex-prime ministers and diplomats in black suits sleep in mid-century leather chairs. Doors lead to meticulous bars, restaurants, and guest rooms (which, to be honest, are not particularly notable) in the new tower. Below is a haunted, silent, always empty mall where you can get a custom shirt made or buy a decorative brooch. No one speaks English. It’s magical and dreamlike. 

Ranakpur Temple, Rajasthan. A Jain temple in Rajasthan, India, built in the 15th century, the Ranakpur Temple complex is an amazing group of marble and white-stone temples surrounded by roses and wild monkeys. The buildings are highly detailed, with the most handsome chiseled features and facades in the world — they make Timothée Chalamet’s face look boring. Their stonework banding and the perfection of every component meeting and resolving into, around, and over each other is incredible. Enormous trees grow out from them, red roses are everywhere, and mischievous monkeys leap out to steal your sunglasses and cookies. Allegedly the occasional white peacock or black panther will sneak by, then you have basically seen all there is to see in life. We were engaged there. We fell in love with each other, and with everything there.

 

Clignancourt Flea Market, Paris. If you are not blessed enough to go to the École des Beaux-Arts for a decade or two to study every period of design in history, you can instead go to Clignancourt Flea Market a couple dozen times. Believe us, it will be a wider spectrum education. Aisle after aisle of alternatively meticulous and messy (but all interesting) booths line the neighborhood's streets and interiors. Specifically, visit the Paul Bert-Serpette section; every period from Roman to the 1980s is covered — not only the top 100 designs of these periods but also lesser-known genius work (and not-so-genius experimentation) is exhibited. The expressions of creativity, monstrous and sublime, all spill into the streets. Our education and eye were strengthened and fine-tuned by long days spent here during annual pilgrimages that span the last 30 years. Discovering a Bugatti chair and a giant 1970s Iraqi steel-and-glass sculpture that looked like Darth Vader carved it while on LSD widened and blew our minds. It still does.

 

Hiiragiya Ryokan, Kyoto. Hiiragiya was built over 200 years ago and sits in a fairly normal neighborhood in Kyoto, surrounded by modern buildings. It’s fairly subdued outside; inside it is everything but. To experience even one night sleeping in its flawless Edo period environment is life-changing. Once inside, you’re required to change into the traditional clothes provided in each guest room — a practice that begins to break you down and free your mind. Also sitting in a room with absolutely no furniture, except a low table with two cups on it, is difficult at first. You get better at it after 10 hours or so. That's after 10 hours of figuring out how the sliding doors and bathroom work. All of the details in the room force you to slow down, calm down, and (to be honest) just shut the hell up and stop complaining and asking for things. In the morning after a difficult sleep on a futon that was silently brought into the room at bedtime, I slid the screen open to see my own private courtyard garden for the first time. There was a slow, silent snow falling. A tree was collecting it on the branches, which also held one orange persimmon. As my tired eyes focused, I spotted a partridge sitting up there, calmly, with those long, colored tail feathers. It stared back at me. I was never again jaded. We try to go back once a year.

 

In 2015 I met up with Madonna at a midtown Manhattan hotel to discuss her most recent album, but our conversation was ultimately about so much more. It remains one of the most surreal and thrilling experiences in my life. There are few things more nerve-racking than walking into a room to find Madonna sitting alone on a couch, saying, “Come sit next to me.”

 

Here’s to a summer filled with thrills, chills, unexpected encounters, and endless good vibes. Who knows what might be waiting just around the corner …

        In the crisp, high-altitude morning air of Alta, Utah, The Greatest Snow on Earth® — a term coined in 1960, speaking to the astounding quality of the state’s powder — falls with the lightest touch. I set out, on skis, in the late-spring powder to spot the rare black rosy finch. The endangered, sparrow-sized bird breeds at the highest altitude (between 8,000 and 14,000 feet) of any North American species and is among few pink-plumed species. Studies of this elusive bird have uncovered genetic pathways shared between them and human communities in the Tibetan Himalayas. They brave snowstorms, gale-force winds, and bone-chilling temperatures with a resilience that borders on miraculous.

        For spotting the rosy finch, Alta is the place, year-round. No mega-mountain condo developments or shops here. Instead, there’s a sustainability-minded community committed to long-term preservation of their mountain environment. The Alta Environmental Center and Tracy Aviary are part of a black rosy finch conservation and tracking program, using radio frequency identification via bird boxes and feeders installed on the mountain. My birding-on-skis guide leads me off-piste through pristine subalpine firs to where the objects hang in quiet, untracked glades.

        There, chirping mountain chickadees, red-breasted nuthatches, and pine grosbeaks come and go. We wait and wait in the snow-covered greenery until a blur of black and neon pink flashes in, nibbles at the feeder, and disappears into the snowy sky. The black rosy finch is a fleeting vision of beauty and obscurity, a reflection of the intricate dance of life and survival, of adaptability and resilience encoded in the design of nature itself.

 

        Come winter snow or summer sunshine, Alta Lodge promises an exhilarating mountain stay and ideal pushing off point for birding, hiking, or skiing. Built in 1940 and later renovated by John Sugden, a student of Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus-style property — with its mid-century Bertoia chairs and ski-in, ski-out location — feels like a classic European ski lodge, with floor-to-ceiling windows framing either skiers shushing down the powdery slopes or flower-filled alpine fields. 

Creature Comforts. While I would never have the audacity to try to publicly identify the best burger in New York, I can confidently say that one of the best burgers in this city is currently on the menu at Golden Swan. The brainchild of restaurateur Matthew Abramcyk and Chef Doug Brixton, the restaurant is equal parts fine-dining and luxe lounge, with an eclectic menu that offers everything from a duck terrine to housemade cavatelli. On my recent visit, the much-lauded Brixton Burger did not disappoint. Made from a melange of chuck, brisket, and short rib and served with gruyère cheese, balsamic onion, and a side of duck-fat fries, it’s the kind of gussied-up comfort food I live for, made all the more enjoyable when accompanied by a signature “martini” featuring mezcal and pineapple. –T. Cole Rachel

 

Up (Up) and Away. Space Perspective has recently unveiled a test capsule designed to carry eight explorers (and a captain) to the edge of space. Attached to a hydrogen balloon, the finished pod will offer a superlative environment and spectacular views over its six-hour journey. Perhaps a spaceflight playlist is in order. –John Chuldenko

 

Save Face. I’m in a super fun, new era wherein my face spontaneously breaks out into angry, ruddy allergic patches. It’s sensitive, dry, and hard to make sense of. Who doesn’t love a mystery? One moisturizer has become an unexpected ally in this sad little battle: Gel Crème Lejand by Furcy Botanik. Made with djon djon mushroom and guava leaves, it’s light enough for reactive skin yet incredibly hydrating. It also has a neutralizing effect, settling out redness and bringing a nice glow to pallid areas. I’ve just finished my jar, scooping out the last bits (a substance not dissimilar to the custard found inside a donut) with desperate, clawing fingers. –Sophie Mancini