Alfa Romeo — the Biscione

This is the single greatest badge in the history of the automobile and most people have looked at it ten thousand times without ever seeing what it is.

On the right half of the Alfa Romeo roundel: a blue serpent, crowned, rearing, with a small red human figure protruding from its jaws. On the left: the red cross of Milan. The two halves are the arms of the city and the arms of the Visconti, the family that ruled it — and the serpent is the biscione, the Visconti’s device since the fourteenth century at the latest.

The origin story, as told in Milan, involves a crusading Visconti defeating a Saracen champion and taking the serpent from his shield. It is a good story. It is almost certainly retrospective. Heraldic beasts rarely have birth certificates; they have justifications, invented later, by descendants who need one.

The interesting scholarly argument is not where it came from but what it is doing. The figure in the serpent’s mouth is usually described as being devoured. But there is a persistent alternative reading — that the figure is emerging, being disgorged, born out of the animal rather than consumed by it. The iconography genuinely supports both. The figure is not struggling. Its arms are, in most renderings, raised.

Alfa Romeo has had a hundred and fifteen years to clarify this and has never once done so, and the Ophidiary regards that restraint as the single most sophisticated act of brand management in the industry. The badge means devouring on the day your Alfa breaks down, and it means rebirth on the day it does not, and it has meant both to the same owner within the same week.

The design was fixed in 1910 by a draughtsman named Romano Cattaneo, who — according to the account the company has always preferred — was standing at Piazza Castello in Milan waiting for a tram when he looked up at the Filarete tower of the Sforza castle and saw the biscione carved there. A tram stop. That is where the greatest emblem in motoring came from: a man with nothing to do, looking up.

The serpent has survived every redesign. The wordmark has changed, the ring has changed, the human figure has been abstracted almost to a flourish, and in the current mark it is drawn with such restraint that a casual viewer sees only a decorative curl. But it is still there, still crowned, still with something coming out of its mouth, on the front of every Giulia and every Tonale and every Alfa that will ever be built.

No Alfa Romeo has ever been named after a snake. It has never needed to be. The snake is on the front, and it has been eating — or delivering — a person since before the company existed.