PASSION
Alfa Romeo and coachbuilders
26 July, 2017
Elvira Ruocco Historical memory of Alfa Romeo thanks to her more than twenty years of experience at the Alfa Romeo Centro di Documentazione Storica, has become part of the Museum team and in the column "Elvira Racconta" she will share curiosities and anecdotes that you don't know or don't remember. We will go over the legendary history of Alfa Romeo with her.
"The car body shop was born only when artisans, technicians and users finally decided to forget the technique of the horse-drawn carriage. There is a lineage of men who, faced with the increasingly overwhelming advent of the motoring miracle, understood that it was necessary to move from a dying industry to the nascent one. And of these men only those who were able to forget remained standing". (Domenico Jappelli)
Before 1930, it can be said that Alfa bodies were mainly hand-built. They mainly produced chassis that, because of their personality, were much sought after by the various coachbuilders because making a car with the Alfa emblem on the radiator was a status symbol even for the most famous. Few chassis were bodied abroad and, except in a few cases where they were sold directly to the customer, they were generally entrusted directly to the coachbuilder (Vanden Plas, Franay, Louis Gallè, James Young, the best known foreign ones) by Alfa itself or by the importer and dealer to reduce customs duties.
Images from the web
In the early years Alfa, unlike other car manufacturers, did not feel the need to have its own bodywork production, but provided assistance and a guarantee as all the cars were deliberated before delivery. The few chassis produced in the period between the two wars were bodied by Touring, Stabilimenti Farina, Zagato, Francis Lombardi, Ghia and Garavini who, by creating the legendary Portello cars, contributed imagination and style to the image of Alfa Romeo. Generally at that time all the bodies were made up of a wooden supporting structure covered with imitation leather, later iron was used, while aluminium was rarely used. All these elements were held together by screws, bolts, glue and in practice constituted the body that was attached to the chassis. In his "Storia dei carrozzieri" (History of coachbuilders), Angelo Tito Anselmi reports that in 1923 Nicola Romeo thought it would be a good idea to offer Alfa customers not only "fuoriserie" (custom-built cars) but cars with standardized bodies. So in June of the same year, he set up Carrozzeria Nord Italia, a subsidiary coachbuilding firm which was entrusted with the fitting of some of the RL and RM chassis and the first examples of the NR 6C 1500 (*1). This operation did not appear clear to the majority shareholders who contested his actions (*2) and the body shop was closed "for lack of work" on September 12, 1928. (*3)
"It was said of the Alpha at the time that: "at the Portello they were incapable of producing two identical cars." They were all custom-built."
In 1929, following a major reorganization of Alfa, the engineer Prospero Gianferrari, who had been appointed General Manager of the Liquidity Institute that had taken control of Alfa, was authorized to make investments and the priority fell on the creation of an in-house bodywork department that came into operation at the end of 1930. (*1) Cipher: La storia dei carrozzieri by Angelo Tito Anselmi (*2) and (*3) Cifr.: Il Portello by Duccio Bigazzi.