Alfa Romeo question

wspohn wrote: The British made beautiful cars. The Italians habitually made beautiful cars with the odd aberration. The Germans made functional cars, some of which turned out to be rather beautiful if the lines happened to coincide with what engineering design allowed. The Japanese can't make a beautiful car to save themselves. In the Good Old Days they got exactly two right - Toyota 2000 GT and the Datsun 240Z. Just about everything since then looks odd - jelly beans with handles on the back, or turgid heavy looking lumps, or..... An example of an Italian 'miss' a Junior Zagato......just not a fan of the 'needle nosed ferret' style idiom I guess. And the Mi To?? Funny thing is that the same car can elicit both praise form half the group and laughter from the other half. I once insulted a guy that absolutely loved this Abarth (hopefully a one-off) by saying it looked like an ant eater in search of lunch.

Junior Zagato looks awesome IMO. I'd have one if they didn't cost like $20k

kreb wrote: Most current Alfas look like sex on wheels to me. Then again, Alfa also made such questionable cars such as 1980s vintage Milanos. The Milano OTOH is still a damn site better looking than such monstrosities as the Ford EXP and Pontiac Aztec. The whole era of creased-line styling looks so very dated on most cars, but somehow works on most Italians. They "get it".

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the Milano/75. I challenge anyone to find an eighties designed sedan, that isn't a halo car or uber luxury car that's better. Although I do admit that some of the lower trim level models had dorky wheels (but they looked fine on the GTV )

I think the Milano/75 looks better than the 164 that replaced it. That is a car that has not aged well.. it still looks better than most everything that came out at that time, but the styling was not as special.

the car that came before it was a bit bland too (good looking, but nothing too special) the Alfetta Sedan

I'm going to agree with the fans of the RX-7, although the last generation was by far my favourite. The Infiniti M, not so much, at least for me.

As for Italian misfires, I once drew the ire of an Alfa admirer by suggesting that this prototype of the beautiful (IMO) TZ looked like a hyperthyroid ferret. What do you think (production version posted below it)

FD RX7, Z32 300ZX, and maybe JZA80 Supra are all cars that I consider beautiful in the sense that even when you see a clean one today, it doesnt look old and dated, they look just as modern as anything else on the road. They have aged well and were ahead of their time style wise. IMO.

I think it has something to do with the role of art in culture and cultural history. Italians grow up living in the museum of the history of western civilization which is called Italy. There are long-standing structures and sculptures all over the place that harken to a time when art and aesthetics were highly valued by the power elites and thus were talents worth aspiring towards, and their creations outlived the rich men who paid for them. Americans grow up in a country whose main points of pride are our grand successes at concentrating wealth through exploitation of the weak, and inventing mass production. Those values have left monuments, of a sort, all over the place, but they generally arent the kind of thing you grow up learning about that make you want to be an artist. America places a pretty damn low value on art and artists. Our values create artists of a different sort. They've been creating wonderfully abstract, interpretative art forms called 'financial instruments' for a good while now.

This is not much of a mystery to me. They grow up in a place where power and wealth have come and gone, but the art has survived and is spoken about the world over. We live in a place that doesnt have enough history to have that kind of aesthetic heritage. We're still in the phase where most of our history involves murder and theft. Italy was there once too. When our dreams of empire come crashing down and the only history we actually want to associate with are the few beautiful things we made, our children will grow up with a more artistic bent too. But by that time they'll probably be designing beautiful ways to combat global warming and not feel too wistful about the beautiful exteriors of the carbon pumps we were cruising around in in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The philosophical component of this thread has made me recall of one of my favorite film lines:

"...in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

-Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949)

wspohn wrote: I'm going to agree with the fans of the RX-7, although the last generation was by far my favourite. The Infiniti M, not so much, at least for me. As for Italian misfires, I once drew the ire of an Alfa admirer by suggesting that this prototype of the beautiful (IMO) TZ looked like a hyperthyroid ferret. What do you think (production version posted below it)

that front shot is sexy

mad_machine wrote: I think the Milano/75 looks better than the 164 that replaced it. That is a car that has not aged well.. it still looks better than most everything that came out at that time, but the styling was not as special.

The 164 was certainly a product of its time. It was designed in the mid-late 1980s when creases were a thing, and it was also one of the first cars designed with CAD. That being said, my 164 still gets compliments for its looks. "Handsome" is one word I hear a lot. It's also the closest I will get to owning a Alfa GT or 156 GTA Sportwagon unless I move to Europe.