EVERYONE'S GOT ONE: HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAD ALPHA!

24 July, 2021

The Alfa Matta for the Museum is a special piece and from today, with its entry in the official register, even more so!

It was 1950 when the Italian Ministry of Defence decided to issue a call for tenders for the purchase of a batch of off-road vehicles for the Army, the Police and other ministries.
Alfa Romeo - which until then had distinguished itself by designing models with extremely elegant lines - decided to take part, creating from scratch an off-roader immediately christened 1900 M: enthusiasts know that 1900 is the car from which the engine comes and that M stands for the wording "military".

This is how Alfa 'Matta' was born, with the first name of 1900 M AR/51 (Autovettura da Ricognizione 1951, the year of ministerial homologation) and with a completely different character and look to those Alfa Romeo had accustomed enthusiasts to up to that time.

"The AR/52 version The AR/52 version was then built", explains the founder of the Italian Matta Register, Franco Melotti, "which was intended for civilian use, less spartan and with more attention to detail. The beauty of the Matta is that it is the only Alfa Romeo off-road vehicle born to go "off the road".off the road".That's right: over time the company has made other 4×4s, but designed for less onerous uses".

Matta is a nickname, of course; and if you're wondering how the 1900 AR/51 went down in history under that label, here's why:

The Alfa Romeo director of those years, engineer Antonio Alessio, saw the prototype climb up and down the San Siro hillock built on the post-war rubble: the car went like crazy and did 'crazy things!', so the nickname indicates the vein of madness and almost recklessness of the prototype as soon as it left the factory.

In those days there were no radars or drones to search for the enemy," explains Melotti, "to explore the territory in the event of war there were off-road vehicles or trucks divided into light, medium and heavy wagons. The Matta cost the same as a flat, or around 1.9 million lire, and was built without skimping on materials, using the best available on the market in terms of technology. Suffice it to say that the French Houdaille rotating piston shock absorbers with which it was equipped were the same as those used in the Formula 1 cars of the time: not even the army could almost afford it.

"In the end, everyone has a Matta" Franco Melotti on Alfa collectors.

A historical scene in which alfa matta is also a protagonist: she can be seen in the background, behind fausto coppi and gino bartali

Franco Melotti, as well as having founded the Register by implementing that of Peter Marshall, later abandoned, is a great collector of Alfa Matta: he owns 10 of which the first, taken in 1979, was used for 11 years as an off-roader and restored in the 1990s. The Register has free registration but you must clearly own a Matta: even the Museum's AR/51, chassis no.22, was registered with Franco's visit!

For me it's not just a hobby," says Melotti, "but a real passion. When I was a child, my father, a former Alpine soldier who loved the mountains, often repeated that he would buy us a jeep to go on trips, but it never arrived at home. I waited for it for years and when I got my first paycheck I bought it and chose a Matta".

There are about 300 Alfa Matta (AR/51) registered in the Register and about 20 (AR/52) scattered all over the world, some of them in Australia, Japan, South Africa, Argentina and Europe. A total of 2057 were produced.

"Over time IOver time I discovered that all the important collectors had at least one Matta, whether beautiful or ugly. After all, the designer Giuseppe Busso who created it told me that the Matta was a matter of pride for Alfa. To show that even in the off-road field Alfa Romeo was better than Fiat'.

Founder of the Italian Matta Register, Franco Melotti, collector: he owns 10 Alfa Matta cars