Italdesign Says Concorso d’Eleganza Didn’t Accept its Application for the BMW Group Organized Show

For more than 80 years now, some of the most beautiful and rare production and concept cars have come together from all parts of the world on the shores of Lake Como, Italy, for the annual Concorso d’Eleganza (Competition of Elegance) a Villa d’Este. This year’s edition of the show kicked off on Friday, May 24 and will run through the weekend.

Iconic design studio Italdesign Giugiaro has participated in the event every year since 2002, when it won two awards for the Alfa Romeo Brera Concept, but it won’t be attending the 2013 edition of the show, something we learned about today via a press statement.

In the release, the Italian design house, which was taken over by the Volkswagen Group in 2010, implied that the organizers didn’t accept its application to participate in the show, where it wanted to display the Lamborghini-powered Parcour Concept study that we first laid eyes on at the 2013 Geneva Motor Show in March.

The BMW Group name is not mentioned in the release, but the German carmaker has been the main sponsor and organizer of the event for the past 10 years.

We contacted Italdesign for more details, and we will update this post when they respond back to us. In the meantime, you can read the Italian company’s press statement below.

Update: An Italdesign spokesman wrote back to Carscoops saying that, “We have no further comments about the Villa d’Este Concorso d’Eleganza”. Looks like the Italians aren’t very happy with the way this was handled.

First Villa d’Este without Italdesign Giugiaro

“The appointment with Concorso d’Eleganza di Villa d’Este is just around the corner, in the past few days we’ve received a lot of email from many of you fans, telling us how happy they were to have the chance to take a close look to the Parcour – awarded by the American magazine AutoWeek as Geneva Motorshow “Best Concept”- during the exhibition.

We’ve been participating in Villa d’Este for twelve years, every year we brought our latest creation meeting a lot of enthusiastic fans with a real passion for cars, just like us. With the Alfa Romeo Brera Concept, back in 2002, we won both the Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este Design Award, and the BMW Group Design Award.

Unfortunately, this year, we won’t be there. And not because we chose not to be there.

As we always did in the past, we subscribed a lot in advance the deadline, but this wasn’t enough.

We are sure we will have many other occasions in the future to meet you and we will find some other places to share our common passion.

See you soon!”