Great Drive: 2009 Porsche Boxster S

The uncannily prescient transmission mapping was particularly impressive in its ability to sense when the car was entering a turn, often downshifting before I'd thought of it. Neophytes could learn a lot from Sport Plus about how to drive a Porsche - mainly, as Paul Newman used to counsel, to "keep the revs up." Thoroughly besotted, I left the Boxster in Sport Plus for the rest of the day except when passing through towns, where the mode's appetite for the fat part of the torque band sent engine rasps echoing off the stone houses and storefronts. Quieting the car proved especially suitable in Paceco, a town whose residents drive as though shouldering their way through a crowd of friends and family at a wedding reception - and who will honk at you for stopping at a stoplight. You wouldn't want to make a racket in Paceco. Heading down the coast, where the wind had whipped the sea into a memorable oil-paint green, I picked up some of the longest Targa Florio route, the one that from 1912 to 1914 and again from 1948 through 1950 encircled almost the entire island. Drivers completing that 650-plus-mile race would sometimes be so exhausted that they had to be lifted from their cars, and I could see why. While too many American roads appear to have been designed by civil engineers, Sicilian roads evince the graceful, confident touch of Renaissance artists like Giotto, who, when asked by a Papal emissary to submit drawings for consideration in a design competition, took a piece of paper and drew, freehand, a perfect circle. These roads are spectacular and exciting to drive but so challenging in their sense of what a driver ought to be able to accomplish that they can really wring you out. Hurtling down a steep mountain road behind an Audi A8 whose driver clearly felt that his manhood was on the line, then passing him in a turn washed with mud and gravel while blue sea filled the windshield, I was grateful that the powerplant behind my shoulders was not a big lump by Ferrari or Lamborghini but a tidy six that simply kicked the rear out a few feet before leaping ahead as eagerly as a racing whippet trotting to the starting gate. This car is a lot of fun to drive. Fearing that the fun level might be interfering with the imperatives of journalistic integrity, after lunch I headed east along the relatively flat though entirely magnificent Strada di Salemi, an Italian artwork featuring big, sweeping turns built to howl through at triple-digit speeds. In such turns, the Boxster demonstrated stability superior to that of many 911s, which can get searchy, and it was unfazed by side winds gusting so strongly that the giant wind turbines outside Marsala had shut themselves down.