Nuccio
Bertone
The Italian design and coachbuilding firm known today as Carrozzeria Bertone dates to 1912, the year Giovanni Bertone set up a carriage building and repair facility in Turin. Two years later, a son was born to the Bertone household, a son who would have a major impact on the, world of automotive design. His name was Giuseppe, nicknamed Nuccio, and the most recent of his many honors is that of Honored Designer at EyesOn the Classics.
Nuccio Bertone, then 20, joined his father's business in 1934, the year the firm exhibited its special-bodied Fiat Ardita, the Superaerodinimica, at the Turin Auto Show.
In the years following World War II, Nuccio Bertone raced Fiats, OSCAs, Maseratis, and Ferraris, an activity that taught him much about aerodynamics, cooling, and vehicle dynamics. At the 1952 Turin Auto Show, Bertone reached agreement with Chicago auto dealer Stanley Arnolt II to build 200 special-bodied MGs for sale in the U.S. Here the shape of the Bertone firm was determined: a combination of design and coachbuilding.
At the 1952 Paris Auto Show, Bertone attracted attention with an Abarth design that bore the first of the embryonic wings that would distinguish his later work.
Asked to design a successor to the Disco Volante by Alfa Romeo, Bertone created the first of the designs that came to be known as the BAT cars on the Alfa 1900 Sprint chassis. BAT stood for Berlina Aerodinamica Technica and these cars' resemblance to the Batmobile was purely coincidental.
In 1954, again at the Turin Show, Bertone showed the Storm Z, a car aimed at American tastes and built on a modified Dodge platform. He also showed the seventh of the BAT cars, but the most important Bertone offering was the Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint prototype, the first of a long series. The Bertone works would ultimately build more than 40,000 of these coupes.
In 1960, Bertone built more than 31,000 bodies, ranging from the Fiat 850 Spider to the Fiat Dino and Simca 1200S coupes, plus the Alfa Romeo Montreal and various Lamborghinis. Bertone design number 100, shown at the 1965 New York Auto Show, was a special Ford Mustang commissioned by Automobile Quarterly.
Bertone's company philosophy was summed up at the time of the Fiat 850's introduction: "Our role is the production of car bodywork on which we impose the styling trends, build prototypes, develop the design, the production methods, and the tooling. Naturally, we produce them in quantity."
Bertone also produced designs for Ferrari, a company generally associated with Pininfarina. These included two special-bodied 25OGT coupes and the 308GT4. He also created the Aston Martin DB4 Jet shown at the 1961 Geneva show.
Throughout the 1960s, Bertone educated many young designers, among them Giorgetto Giugiaro, one of the leading designers of the present era.
Nuccio Bertone's many contributions to automotive design are celebrated at EyesOn Classic Design, and he received an award for lifetime automotive design achievement at the 1994 Vision Honored banquet.
