Really, as a bull trotting into a Spanish fighting ring, the best you can hope for is to someday have a Lamborghini named in your honor. Because after the mules drag out your skewered carcass, your future is pretty much one of minute steaks and dog food.

The bull named Aventador, all 1118 pounds of him, put up a good fight in Zaragoza back on October 15, 1993. Matador Emilio Muñoz may have even broken a sweat because after he killed the animal—ideally done with an espada thrust down between the shoulder blades to sever the aorta—Muñoz was awarded one of the ears as a trophy.  And people say hockey is a blood sport. But, alas, nobody has built a carbon-fiber supercar called the Gretzky.

Our 34-hour tryst with a $412,015 Lamborghini Aventador began at its factory in Sant’Agata Bolognese, proceeded to a test track near Milan where the critical acceleration and braking numbers proved to be 3.0 seconds and 144 feet, and ended with a series of redline rips through some deep tunnels in the Apennines near the Mediterranean coast. Spoiler alert: This review will be largely positive.

Murciélago—the bull, not the car—was blessed with a better fate than Aventador, surviving his 24 stab wounds in the ring and retiring with both ears to the Miura family farm, where he was presented 70 cows with which to mate.

The steel-tube frame Murci enjoyed a long life, too, aging into a respectably agile handler but suffering too many vestiges of the old days, including a crowded, offset pedal box, controls that were distant and not very usable or particularly attractive, and tungsten-hard seats. If  you see a weaving Murciélago, the driver is either blotto, seized by lower back spasms, or attempting to operate a radio/navigation unit that was designed by a KGB cipher team. The Aventador is a clean sheet—100 percent new. The overall experience of  living with it, however, is about 90 percent the same, yet there’s notable progress in that 10 percent.

Per the latest fashion in cars and airline tickets, Aventador pricing is a la carte. At the $393,695 base price, you can choose from just two exterior shades, black or yellow, with a black interior. If that is unsuitable, you may want to call in a decorator because you have eight factory body colors from which to choose (ranging from $1650 to $4100 extra), the option of any “out of range” color that you can think of (for $9100), plus four matte-finish colors (price: $14,000). There are four brake-caliper colors (black is standard; our gray ones are $1100), two wheel colors (silver is free; black is $1820), two rear coil-spring colors (black is standard; yellow is $1100), and one stand­ard and five optional interiors (priced from $840 to $3500) from which to pick.

At the factory, we begged for the orange car, but that one was “broken,” so we settled for the base gothic black, which makes the Aventador look like a stag beetle from the Horsehead Nebula. It’s tough to photograph a black Aventador and capture the voids and sinews and traces of its many acute and obtuse angles, but our guy managed. And it’s not as tough as driving an Aventador around Parma at lunchtime.

As in most Italian cities, the streets of the old city are as thin as 6 o’clock and lined by stone curbs that can do to a Lambor­ghini wheel what the bus loads of German retirees do to wheels of the local cheese. The Aventador is almost an inch wider than a Chevy Suburban, and its body is nearly seven feet longer than its wheelbase, which—jumbo wheels notwithstanding—leaves some galactic overhang.

You can avoid the worst chin-dragging incidents by learning quickly where the button lies for the front suspension jack (in the bank below the nav screen). It raises the nose 1.6 inches. Still, easing out of a blind alley onto a busy street means being preceded into the right-of-way by a couple yards of  beak. Running errands in an Aventador is like going for tacos in the Blue Flame.

So many people will dismiss this car in all its decadent hugeness as just a badge of wankerism for old rich men in Viagra heat. Which is why it is so much more fun to test one in Italy. There, a passing Lambo evokes the sort of lump in the throat that the Brits get when a Spitfire victory-rolls overhead. This is ours. We made it. It is awesome.

Later, in tiny Pontremoli, an ancient town near Italy’s west coast, I was positioning the Aventador for a shot near a church when an elderly lady with gunmetal hair leaned into the open window—just leaned right in with her broad, Romanesque face—and said, “Siete molto, molto fortunato!” Well, everyone is lucky to be in Italy on a sunny day, even if your car gets 11 mpg and costs $149 to fill. But perhaps a one-eared bovine spirit was indeed watching over us because in more than 500 miles, we managed not to chew a wheel, get arrested, or cause an international incident by scything down a native.

The Aventador is constructed mainly of carbon fiber, though you wouldn’t know it by the curb weight (4085 pounds) or the fact that the magic weave is entirely hidden behind paint, leather, and trim. No doubt, future special editions will weigh less and be stripped naked—for a fee. Meanwhile, the Aventador’s cabin is easier to get into and out of than the Murci’s, through doors that swing up and slightly out and by crossing a narrower and lower sill. And it offers two somewhat spongier bucket seats with which, over time, your back develops an acceptable détente. Heated power seats are $4200. Our car didn’t have them.