Bertone 90 Years 1912-2002

When Giovanni Bertone opened his small artisan workshop in Turin in 1912 for the construction of horse drawn carriages, he never thought he was starting out on a long, multi-form but gratify¬ing adventure, which has now celebrated its 90th anniversary. This publication in two volumes retraces the prin¬cipal periods that have contributed to the evo¬lution of a company that, both in artisan pro¬duction, which began in 1921 and continued into the early Fifties, and in industrialisation that commenced in 1954 with a body for the Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint, and has always been able to marry aesthetic research with execu¬tive refinement. Within volume one Luciano Greggio's text, enriched with documents and valued pho¬tographs - many of them previously unpub¬lished - from the Bertone archives, recon¬struct the company's 90 years by offering the reader a complete and accurate picture in which the cars designed by Bertone are the unchallenged protagonists in the story then of the car itself. In volume 2 ‘The Catalogue’ of designs represents an extraordinary chance to relive the years of artistic and industrial production of the company. In chronological order, the cars built by Carrozzeria Bertone are illustrated, and enable us to retrace the evolving process of style and technical construction that has characterised the company's entire production. A fine selection of examples from the Lancia and Fiat ranges of the 1920s and 1930’s, the unforget¬table Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint, the singular B.A.T series of the early fifties, built on mechanics of the Alfa Romeo 1900, the sensation¬al Lancia Stratos, the exciting Lamborghini Miura and the futuristic Countach, and many con¬cept-cars that asserted their own extraordi¬nary personality. The cars that flowed from the pen of Nuccio Bertone have always revealed them¬selves to be at the forefront of design, with a wealth of bold new features that could always be transferred with success to cars of mass production. This book records that success.