Of all the places you expect to see a Cadillac Eldorado, Venice isn’t one of them. A car like that, wide as a pleasure cruiser and slow as the tide, doesn’t belong in a city carved out of water. It’s a yacht in a sea of gondolas. But for Enrico Busto, that’s exactly the point. As a boy growing up just outside La Serenissima, the image of an Eldorado gliding through his sleepy beach town or the narrow cobblestone roads of Venice, became a kind of dream. An outlier. A memory so large and slow it couldn’t be shaken. Each summer, the same German couple would arrive with that car, coasting past under fenders so large they looked like awnings over a sidewalk cafe. It was a parade float to nowhere in particular. Enrico would wait for them on the sidewalk. When the car rolled past, it made his day. Sometimes, that’s all it takes to steer the rest of your life.
Years later, he found the Eldorado again, this time in Los Angeles. It’s triple cream, long as a city block, and just as absurdly serene as the one from his childhood. Built in '76, it was Cadillac’s last true convertible of its kind. GM called it the end of an era, big motor, soft ride, no apologies. 8.2 liters. 190 horsepower. Less than a modern econobox. Choked by emissions equipment and tuned for smoothness over speed. By 1976, the American V8 had been shackled by new emissions and fuel economy standards. Catalytic converters choked exhaust flow. Compression ratios were slashed. Cam profiles dulled. Carburetors leaned out the mixture to the edge of stalling. Horsepower was sacrificed at the altar of onerous regulation, and even engines this large ended up whispering. It wasn’t so much a goal as it was the only acceptable outcome. That kind of mellowed smoothness wasn’t engineered, it was surrendered to. American luxury didn’t always need to shout, but by the mid-'70s, it wasn’t allowed to. Glide became its final form, and in a way, its most graceful. In surrender, something elegant survived.
Most of the surviving Eldorados aren’t preserved in museums. The good ones, like Enrico’s, are still gliding down the interstate, kept alive by people who understand what they are. The rest are withering somewhere west of Amarillo, half-covered in tarps that never quite fit, dissolving into the horizon. Their vinyl tops have curled back like scorched leaves. Their dashboards are split. Chrome pitted. Tires sunken into caliche. Too big to tow, too thirsty to run, too sentimental to scrap. They sit still, heat shimmering above the hood, forgotten under the weight of their own excess. That Enrico’s still glides through the canyons of Los Angeles, still drops jaws in traffic, is a quiet kind of miracle. Not over-restored, just well-loved and alive, exactly as it should be.
“I don’t like to judge people by their car,” Enrico says, “but I love that my car tells you something about me. I want to go through everything in my life with calm and with a little smile,” he says. “That’s what this car does. It doesn’t take corners so much as it leans through them. The steering is light, the ride is lighter. It’s like driving a cow through the canyons,” he laughs. “And I love that.” In a world obsessed with being fast, being first, or being seen, it takes nerve to go slow.
Enrico came to California in 2001 and instantly recognized something he’d never known in Italy: freedom. Not the political kind, but the expressive kind. “People here can dress however they want. Say what they want. Be what they want. That was shocking to me. That was the moment I knew this was home.” It took him nearly two decades to get back, but the Eldorado helped make it real. It was on his bucket list. Some people climb mountains. Enrico wanted the car that changed his summers. “Driving it is like a Western,” he says, drawing a line from Sergio Leone to General Motors. “It’s about having your own way to move through the world.”
Maybe that’s what this car is really about, its scale and softness giving shape to something bigger than sheet metal and chrome. Enrico doesn’t think of it as a machine. It’s more like a gesture. A rolling reminder that we can choose how we approach each day.
WATCH THE FILM
