A pre-war puzzle in a post-war disguise: who was responsible for this Italian experiment?

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Yes, we realise the car here is more likely to date back to post-war rather then pre-war days, or its body at least. However, we have been racking our brains to the extreme and still don’t know what this curiosity and its coachbuilder could have been. The desire to find out what it is is nagging away at us, and we would very glad if someone could relieve us of our pain.

First of all, this has to be the experimental vision of an Italian designer straight after the Second World War. After the typical pre-war look of separate wings topped with round headlights, long running boards with spare wheels on both sides and upright chrome grilles, Italy's master stylists were looking for something completely different and came up with all sorts of ideas, many of them featuring pontoon shapes with integrated wings, lights and what have you. They were looking to find new shapes well before America started to influence styling trends with tail fins and tons of chrome.

If we were to make a bet, we’d say the base is likely to be an Alfa Romeo 6C 2500 or a Lancia Aprilia. There are some early post-war examples of both models with rather outrageous body styles, but it’s hard to pin this one to one particular carrozzeria. Stabilimenti Farina did some 6Cs and Aprilias with futuristic-looking wide fronts with horizontal lines all over them. There are also a few Bertone and Monviso cars with similar faces. Ghia was no exception, either—its portfolio includes a 6C with its still-round headlights hidden in integrated square housings. A new brand name for 1946 was Meteor, which was applied to a Fiat 1100-based convertible. That looked suspiciously like a scaled-down version of Ghia's Alfa 6C, including the square-cased headlights.

Looking further, perhaps we see the work of a young Giovanni Michelotti? He designed some Speciales for Farina with equally blunt fronts ánd square headlights, including an open and a closed Aprilia ‘tank’.

We can’t decide. All the cars we can find never have the double headlights in such an unusual arrangement as this one, but still we have a feeling we have seen this style somewhere before. Help!

Words: Jeroen Booij; picture; source unknown
 

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