I remember my first Alfa Romeo very well, because I tried to eat it. It belonged to my father. I think it was a late 1970s Giulietta – I remember it as very square – and, in a Surrey street filled with Volvo estates, it marked us out as dangerous bohemians, though we were nothing of the sort.
This is a car for people who want a romantic Italian car then, but don’t really, because romance is deadly
But cars do this, among other things: they provide a feint, a life you seek. Perhaps I saw through it because I used to lean forward and chew the seats of my father’s Giulietta. Maybe I hated the car. Maybe I hated him. Maybe I wanted to have a Volvo estate. But I can still taste the leather, and I am sorry.
Alfa Romeo is often forgotten, like a middle child. It is the Italian marque that isn’t Ferrari and isn’t Fiat, though it made some of the most beautiful cars of the 1960s: motorheads say everyone should drive an Alfa Romeo at least once in their lives. At least I think they were some of the most beautiful cars of the 1960s, but I never really got the Jaguar E-type, though people rave about it. I think it looks weird, like a fingernail, and it was beloved by grown men who date schoolgirls. Alfa Romeo was doughtier, and more respectable. It offered a variant of La Dolce Vita to middle-class English people and Benjamin Braddock of The Graduate, who drove a red 1600 Spider, a car that looks like a VW Beetle that suddenly discovered sex and loved it: a fallen VW Beetle, then. (Both have incomparable headlamps, twin moons.)
Alfa Romeo was thrilled by this, and named a later Spider The Graduate, which sort of misses the point. But perhaps that is the point of Alfa Romeo which is, we must remember, an Italian car: beneath hedonism, find pressed steel. Alfa is an acronym for Lombard Automobile Factory Company and, of all the things I like about it, I like this best. Its badge – well, half of it – is the arms of the Viscontis of Milan: a grass snake eating a man, though Giovanni Maria Visconti also fed men to dogs before it was illegal. I like this too. I like a marque that can’t forget.
If this is a sumptuous brand – cars named Cortina and Capri were trying to evoke it, because everyone longs for Italy in the end – it is ever more respectable. You will no longer find a sex-crazed car at Alfa Romeo. I looked. They are more cautious: like Ben Braddock, they grew up – though I don’t know if he took the job in plastics. I think he did.
The Alfa Romeo website offers many respectable cars, all sprayed red – a darker red than the classic Ferrari, hotter, more female and dangerous. (Ferraris are always male. You sit in one, and you know.) There are SUVS in small, medium and large – the Junior, the Tonale (‘tonal’), the Stelvio (‘field’). I translate the names because I like them. They are real. The saloon – the car to eat – is the Giulia and the Quadrifoglio (‘four-leaf clover’) variant has a Ferrari engine, and a body as beautiful as anything Alfa Romeo has produced. It took a chunk out of the German super saloon, to much anguish in Bavaria. The two-seater supercar is the Stradale (‘of the road’): only 33 were made, and it cost almost £1.7 million when new. I won’t be driving that, though I want to.
Instead, I have the Tonale Sport, a hybrid with a 1.3 litre petrol engine and an electric motor which takes us from 0-62 mph in 6.6 seconds. It’s the first car Alfa Romeo produced under Stellantis, which has owned it since 2021, and it’s a lovely thing to look at, being Italian. It may be a medium SUV, but its pedigree is superb – see the Visconti snake – and its lines are sinuous and smooth. It’s descended from the Alfa Romeo that won the first Formula 1 championship in 1950, and that is what it offers: an echo of something perfect, and I think I need the echo. I don’t think I could relax in a Stradale, not really; and I certainly couldn’t relax in a Spider, especially with Benjamin Braddock.
This is a car for people who want a romantic Italian car then, but don’t really, because romance is deadly. It is a compromise and there is something noble in that; nostalgia is built into every marque. It is comfortable, it handles well, I don’t crash it, and people like it: they smile at the snake. Maybe they wonder if I am a dangerous bohemian, though I am nothing of the sort.
I find it charming, but since I ate the last Alfa Romeo, I would.
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