Colli Wagons (was: re: 164 Wagon Model on eBay)

["John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@domain.elided>]

Dave Johnson suggests perhaps I could fill in a little on the history of
Colli's Alfa wagons. Not really much, I'm afraid.

 Alfa's first plunge into production wagons was a very modest one, Colli
building 91 (Fusi's numbers) of the Giulietta Promiscua against 131,785
Berlinas and T.I.s, a whopping .00069 market share. (Colli also made an
unstated number of stretched Giulietta Berlinas "for ceremonial use", with a
purely rectangular rear door, and rear quarter windows which appear to be the
size and shape of the standard rear door windows. Both the Promiscua and the
stretch limo were mostly, if not all, 101s.) Moretti, Vignale, Zagato and no
doubt others also produced cosmetic variants of the standard Giulietta
Berlinas, most of them rather ugly, more Detroitish than Milanese. (Think
fifties DeSoto.) The Collis were straight translations of the Alfa originals,
unadorned.

 I would note that I have never seen or heard of a Promiscua version of the
102 or 106 Berlina, Alfa's flagship cars of the period analogous then to the
164 in the late eighties/early nineties.

 Numbers are harder to come by on the 105 wagons. Fusi gives sixteen as the
number of Giulia Super Promiscuas, 5 lhd + 1 rhd in 1968 and 9 lhd + 1 rhd in
1969. Most of the Collis were T.I.s rather than Supers, and no source I have
gives numbers. They were used by the police and by other government offices
and also as service vehicles by Alfa distributors and major dealers. A
discussion I had with a Dutch dealer, who stated firmly that his Giulia wagon
had been built in his own body shop, together with a text statement in d'Amico
& Tabucchi that they were also produced on commission by other coachbuilders,
suggests to me that Colli not only built some complete cars but also made up
kits of the special stampings for others to use in building wagons out of
standard Giulia Berlinas. Variable quality-control of kit-built T.I. wagons
could account for Alfa doing the later handful of Supers in-house. The how
many? question remains unanswered; I would guess something between two hundred
and five hundred for government and service vehicles, with probably none
offered for sale to walk-in customers, who could still get them from
coachbuilders if wanted.

 After that among the big Alfas we see a single 75 Sport Wagon built by Rayton
Fissore and exhibited at Geneva in 1987, but I can't recall reading or hearing
about a Sport Wagon (Promiscua, Giardinetta, Shooting Brake, whatever) on the
1750, 2000, Alfetta Berlina, Sei, 90, or 164. Hatches galore on the Alfasud,
Alfetta coupe, Arna, 33, 145, some as "hatches" but some as Giardinettas or
Sport Wagons. The Lancia Thema, in many respects directly comparable to the
164, but aimed at a slightly different demographic, also was available as a
wagon. I am left with a strong impression that the connotations of a wagon,
whether considered a proletarian Promiscua or a suburbanite Giardinetta or a
gentry's Shooting Brake, did not fit the image which Alfa, and later Fiat,
wanted to project for the 164's market niche. There may have been a few (if
there is a Zat in Wisconsin there could be a Zattian doppelganger somewhere in
Italy) but I rather doubt there was a company-built car or a company-sponsored
prototype.

 I don't have Colli's company history handy - will look it up tomorrow - but
it was clearly a useful local outside resource for Alfa in the fifties and
early sixties, and I can't remember having heard of them in any other context.
Much of coachbuilding was a fashion industry, striving for distinction in
style and elegance for presentation in the grand shows and the great Concours.
The Disco Volante bodies built by Touring were visually spectacular, dramatic,
and memorable, and aerodynamically unstable; when Alfa developed the series a
couple of stages further (the 6C 3000 CM) and ran them in the Mille Miglia and
a few other races they had Colli built the bodies, which were relatively
crude, brutal, ugly and effective in contrast to the elegance of line of the
Touring Dischi originals. After their racing career ended three of them were
rebodied by Zagato (as a Spider) and by Boano (as the Juan Peron coupe) and by
Pininfarina (as the series of "Superflow" show cars which led to the Duetto's
styling). After the high-fashion Boano body was definitively wrecked the
current owner had the chassis rebodied in a copy of the Colli Mille Miglia
coupe, but (inevitably, I suppose) the new body has a degree of refinement of
form and finish which was clearly absent from the Colli original - a running
and vintage-racing gloss on an originally relatively quick-and-dirty race car.
(The Spider in the Alfa museum is also tidied-up.) Apart from the half dozen
6C sports-racers, the Giulietta stretch limo, and the Giulietta and Giulia
Promiscua wagons I doubt that you will see Colli's name often, or on any 164
conversion.

 Cheers,

John H.

Raleigh N.C.

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