As purveyors of rare, oddball or downright quirky Italian cars, we have to admit to being suckers for a “Special” or “Limited Edition”. If there’s some sort of numbered plaque plastered onto the dashboard or they’ve painted the wheels a different colour as a tenuous tie-in to an obscure brand of coffee machine, we’ll want to own it. Read on as we count down five of our favourite Italian oddities from over the years.
Ordinarily, people only really get to see the cars we've been working on when they're all done, without seeing the work that's gone into getting them to that shiny, sweet-running point. As such, we've decided to keep anyone interested up to date with what we've been getting up to with the spanners. This is the first part of something we aim to do monthly, so be sure to check back soon to follow our progress with these cars.
Walk around any classic car auction and amid the gleaming exotica and priceless rarities you can often find the more mundane and everyday. And, actually, it's these less glaringly obvious finds that can stand out as true value-for-money in today's overcrowded classic market.
Take, for example, a humble Fiat Uno base-model parked alongside a Ferrari F40, both in matching concours condition. An automotive unicorn whose posters were more common in 80s' and 90s' bedrooms than even MFI bunk-beds, the value and importance of the F40 has remained so consistently high that it was never likely to suffer the indignity of a boy-racer fitting a set of TSW Venoms to it. The Uno though - a simple utilitarian mode-of-transport designed solely to get you from A-to-B as inexpensively as possible - has no discernible right to have survived untouched for over two decades. As such, it's the little Fiat that could be viewed as the rarer and, we'd argue, the more interesting find.
With this in mind, here are six of the 'extraordinarily ordinary' Italian cars we've crossed paths with over the past ten years or so here at italicar.
