Delights At The Museum

Alfa Romeo’s museum not only charts the company’s long and sometimes glorious history, it also makes you aware of the passion that has kept the company going through its rockier periods

- Antony Ingram

THINK ALFA ROMEO, THINK CURV ES. THINK lustrous crimsons, cherries, scarlets and garnets, rolling like the Tuscan hills over sophisticated underpinnings and strident engines, and glittering with heart-shaped scudettos or the occasional serpent or delicate four-leaved clover. Think Franchini, Nuvolari, Caracciola, Ferrari, 8Cs, Giulias and Spiders.

You do not think wedges. Certainly not wedges of dazzling, glimmering, disco-era emerald, brought to an abrupt halt by bands of traffic-cone orange, with cavernous vents and a profile low enough to trim the lawn on Centre Court. Yet the Carabo show car from 1968 (see opening image) is a vibrant insight into an Alfa Romeo that might have been.

Instead, Alfa has carefully cultivated the crimson curves image, somehow infusing even its most derided products with the kind of cultural heritage and a loyal, impassioned following that most car makers would kill for. So as a journalist you must fight to remain resolutely objective, enduring the disappointment when a Fiat-based front-drive hatchback with a 1.3 diesel isn’t some kind of 1965 GTA incarnate, hoping that the next car might turn things around.

Perhaps deliberately there are no Mitos, diesel or otherwise, visible within the recently refreshed environs of the Alfa Romeo Museo Storico in Arese, near Milan. It’s the first time evo has visited the museum since its refit between 2011 and 2015, and from the humble saloons to the eye-popping concepts and cigar-shaped racers, it’s a perfect opportunity to relearn why Alfa Romeo still matters.