In the 1950s the Turin Motor Show – the Salone dell’automobile di Torino – was an exceptional event. In a wonderful arched exhibition hall designed by Pier Luigi Nervi, the north Italian design houses vied to demonstrate their imagination and technical ability to the world’s carmakers with some of the most fabulous styling exercises ever created.
Franco Scaglione (1916–93) arrived at Bertone from the aircraft industry in 1951, after a short, unsuccessful relationship with Pininfarina, and began to apply his aerodynamic ideas to experimental cars. His BAT 5 (for Berlinetta Aerodinamica Tecnica) was the sensation of the 1953 Turin show, but it was more than a sensational catch-penny glamour exercise – it had 38 per cent less drag than the ‘donor’ car, meaning that a 50 per cent larger engine would have been needed to give the standard Alfa Romeo the same performance. These aerodynamic ideas certainly percolated through to Alfa Romeo competition and road cars.
Scaglione was followed at Bertone first by Giorgetto Giugiaro (1938–) and then by Marcello Gandini (1938–). These three outstanding designers made Bertone, for a while, the centre of maximum imagination for the development of the postwar car, and their selection is a tribute to the judgment of proprietor Giuseppe ‘Nuccio’ Bertone (1914–97).
Franco Scaglione’s BAT series is a supple and fluid response to an imagined modernity that exposes the crudity of the allusions in the LeSabre (see page 44). The BAT series also speaks of the peerless skill of Torinese craftsmen in hand-forming and welding sheet aluminium.