The woman at the admissions desk of the Prehistory Center tells us that they're closing for lunch in 35 minutes—come back later in the afternoon. But all I want to see is what the museum promotes as "the oldest skull in Europe," and we don't have time to wait two hours. She is plainly annoyed that we're willing to spend $25 for the three of us to enter for half an hour. She throws the entry tickets at us barbarians and stalks away.

The skull of Tautavel Man, it turns out, should more properly be advertised as "the oldest assemblage in Europe of about 100 pieces from some 20 individuals." The amalgam is a lopsided, foreshortened approximation of the head of a hominid that had a brain about 93 percent the size of ours, stood roughly six feet tall, and had the muscles of a serious workout addict.

Barcelona beckons, for all too soon our Quattroporte will revert to a pumpkin. With regret, I turn the Maserati toward its garage.

A Postscript
For the next week, in search of future Great Drive roads in Spain, I drive a little 1.7--liter diesel rental car—a minivan-like Opel Meriva that has four seats just like the Maserati but one-fourth of the Italian car's 400 horsepower and about one-fortieth of its luxury, panache, and style. Yet I have just as much fun in the little five-speed manual quattroporte—which after all translates from Italian as simply "four door"—from Avis, rowing the gearbox to keep the engine near its torque peak and squirting through corners with far more abandon than I would in a Maserati. The Meriva held my wife's, daughter's, and my bodies and carry-on bags with sufficiency if not cosseting, and I came to admire it as an example of Europe's tall, narrow new generation of people movers. Best of all, I realized that there will still be fun on the road even after the 400- and 500-horsepower supercar dinosaurs have been consigned to the tar pits that will contain some of the last petrochemicals on the planet.