Alfa Romeo museum
inspires new ‘fever’
by Gareth Tarr
1910 24hp – the first ALFA model.
lfa Romeo is more than a mere car factor; its products are something more than conventionally-built automobiles. It’s a kind of fever, this enthusiasm for a means of transport. It’s a way of life, a very particular conception of the motor vehicle. Something that resists defini- tion. Its component parts are like those irrational traits of the human spirit that cannot be explained with logical terminology”
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So said senior Alfa engineer Orazio Satta Puliga when interviewed in 1969. If such fever has been somewhat subdued in the company’s products of recent years, the relaunch of the marque is just coming on stream with products like the new Giulia (which has already had a favourable press reception). Opened last year, the re-vamp of the Museo Storico Alfa Romeo forms part of this brand relaunch.
The original Museo Storico was part of an office block built in the mid-1970s just on the edge of Arese where Alfa Romeo was based. For a long time the museum has been rather ignored, with no promotion of its existence, indeed you had to know where to find it and almost be insistent to obtain entrance when I first visited it in the early 90s. Recently the facility has been given a much- needed redevelopment and the new Museo Storico was opened in 2015 as a genuine visitor attraction. It’s still in the same, grim 70s office building but the interior has been stripped so that the museum now forms the main part of the complex with an Alfa and Jeep showroom occupying the rest (think of it as a Mercedes-Benz World in reverse and without the test track). The museum now has its own roundabout where it joins the main road, featuring a stylised sculpture just so you don’t miss it.
It is laid out over a series of off-set half-floors so that as you descend through the building each
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level tells its own part of the Alfa Romeo story, not necessarily in chronological order, more by theme. Before entering the main exhibition however, you pass a mixed collection of racing cars from the last 30 to 40 years (the main competition story is told later on) and then a display of Alfa Romeo aero engines. These include
Unbelievable 18-cylinder aero engine from 1937.
the extraordinary 135 RC 32 from 1937, a 49.7- litre radial 18 (two banks of nine cylinders) whose exhaust system is a work of art in itself. Finally in this extended foyer the story of the Alfa Romeo badge is told. This is much the same as it was when the company started in 1910, with the Visconti serpent on the right and Lombardy cross on the left within a blue circle. Over the years the
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