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CERNOBBIO, Italy — A black, teardrop-shaped 1938 Bugatti, owned by the fashion designer Ralph Lauren, was awarded the prestigious Coppa d’Oro on Saturday here at the Concorso d’Eleganza.

Mr. Lauren, 73, who accepted the huge gold cup and the approbation of an elite gathering of motorcar aficionados and fellow collectors, owns one of the world’s most valuable collections of vintage cars. The elegant 57SC Atlantic Coupe, a former winner of the Pebble Beach Concours d’Élégance, is valued by some experts at up to $40 million. It is but one of more than six dozen exotic cars he owns, some of them reportedly valued even more highly.

“I acquired the car in 1988, and it has always been a favorite of mine,” Mr. Lauren said before receiving the award. “It has won many honors over the years, and I am proud to show it here.”

The Jean Bugatti design is based on a concept car introduced at the 1935 Paris Motor Show. Dubbed the Aérolithe, the car was fashioned from a magnesium alloy called Elektron. The substance couldn’t be welded, Bugatti said, so he incorporated raised seams into the design, riveting them to tie together the car’s body panels. Although Bugatti used weldable aluminum for the four Aérolithe-based Atlantic coupes he built, he retained the exposed seams and rivets as a styling element.

Bugatti’s legendary career as one of the most important automobile designers was cut short soon after this car was built. When he was only 30 years old, he crashed his Type 57 test car into a tree while trying to avoid a drunken bicyclist.

“This is the last of only four Atlantics built,” John Lamm, the author and auto historian, wrote of this car. “Today only two completely original examples are left. One has disappeared — as has the Aérolithe show car — and the rebuild of the other raises, shall we say, questions.”

That makes Mr. Lauren’s Atlantic the pick of the litter, so to speak. Its “SC” designation refers to two separate features of the Type 57. Bugatti added a Roots-type supercharger, or compresseur in French, hence the “C” in the model designation. That raised the output of the already potent 3.3-liter twin-cam straight-8 to about 210 horsepower. The top speed increased to about 130 m.p.h. The “S” designation refers to its low “sous-baisse” under-slung design. The car is right-hand-drive, because the man who ordered it lived in Britain.

“Lauren’s Atlantic is chassis 57591 and it was ordered by an Englishman, Richard Pope, in 1938,” Mr. Lamm said. “Pope loved the car and is said to have put more than 37,500 miles on the Atlantic in the nearly three decades he owned the car.” After that, the Atlantic passed through several owners before Mr. Lauren acquired it.

Mr. Lauren’s Bugatti was one of 50 exceptionally rare and valuable cars entered in this year’s concours. This year’s field included the 2012 Pebble Beach Concours d’Élégance winner, a gray-and-burgundy 1928 Mercedes-Benz 680S Saoutchik Torpedo owned by Paul Andrews of Texas. Among the other entries this year were examples from Hispano-Suiza, Rolls-Royce, Isotta Fraschini, Talbot-Lago, Aston Martin, Ferrari and BMW.

The concours, Europe’s most prestigious vintage car judging event, has been held off and on since 1929 on the ground’s of the Villa d’Este, a 16th century mansion — now one of the world’s top luxury hotels — on the shores of Lake Como.

The event has a colorful history, with turmoil in the 1930s over judging controversies that caused some cancellations, an edict in 1939 by Mussolini that took private cars off the road to redirect industrial production to the war effort and World War II itself.

Restarted after the war, the villa stopped hosting the event after 1948; that was the year a notorious murder occurred here. An Italian countess, Pia Ballentani, shot her lover, Carlo Sacchi, a Como businessman, dead on the dance floor at a fashionable ball on the estate. The married countess, who said she used her husband’s revolver in the crime, was committed to an insane asylum, according to newspaper reports of the day. The affair apparently threw cold water on formal affairs at the villa for some time.

The concours event, now enjoying a long-term sponsorship from BMW, was not revived until 1995. It now includes not only the colorful concours itself, but also a classic car auction, displays of other motoring genres such as motorcycles, and a public viewing day at nearby Villa Erba — one of the smaller villas along Lake Como’s waterfront.