1959 Giulietta Sprint, 1960 Giulietta Berlina,
1962 Giulietta Spider, 1969 1750 Spider
I purchased my first Alfa, a new Spider Veloce, in 1986, and at the same time joined AROC. Then two years later I purchased an ’88 Milano Platinum. Over the previous two decades I had restored three vintage wooden cabin cruisers, and now I started to get the itch to restore a Roundtail. But instead of looking for a car, the car found me at the 1989 AROC Convention in Waterbury, CT. My wife and I had been to a cocktail party, and while we were walking across the hotel parking lot to go to dinner a young man parked a ’69 1750 Spider in front of us and placed a for-sale sign on the windshield. Twenty minutes later I owned the Spider, a car purchased between cocktails and dinner. The restoration of the ’69 Spider was completed in 1992 and again I got the restoration itch. I went searching for a Giulietta Sprint and found a ’59 Euro-spec Sprint in Rhode Island. This restoration was completed in 1996, and I managed to hold the restoration itch at bay until 1999 when I decided I absolutely had to have a Giulietta Spider to go with my Giulietta Sprint. The car I found, a ’62 Giulietta Spider which is a Giulietta/Giulia transition car (a Giulietta with a Giulia body shell) was the ultimate challenge. The car had been off the road since 1980 when it had been in an accident (smashed nose), and then it had passed from one “intended restorer” to another, and what I bought was a disassembled car with unlabeled boxes containing unlabeled parts. I finally got all the parts sorted out, and the crumpled nose was replaced by an NOS front nose panel that had been sitting for 40 years on a dealer’s shelf in Seattle (God is indeed an Italian). An additional Alfa adventure is that I have been fortunate to have visited the Alfa Romeo Museum in Arese a total of seven times, and on one visit, in 1991, I had lunch with Luigi Fusi. It can’t get any better than that!
