The ultimate italian coachbuilder site
The ultimate italian coachbuilder site
Designed by Dante Giacosa and Giovanni Savonuzzi commissioned by Piero Dusio, president of the Juventus Football Club and industrialist at the time. Giacosa came into contact with Dusio thanks to Mr. Casalis at the end of 1944, a trusted man of the Turin industrialist, who was in charge of the bodywork on commission at Cisitalia, at the time a mechanical workshop located in Corso Peschiera which mainly dealt with the production of Beltrame bicycles.
Giacosa, continuing to work for FIAT, took care of the design of the car in his spare time. To facilitate his task, Dusio offered him to stay in his villa in Corso Galileo Ferraris, abandoned by him and his family after a bombing but fully habitable. The project was thus developed with the help of the designer Edoardo Grosso, not without difficulties related to the war. Giacosa recalls that the first 1: 5 scale model in plasticine was destroyed by a German police patrol in search of Dusio. The designer also actively contributed to the construction and development of the first prototype. The body was a simple sheet of aluminum, modeled for the prototype by the coachbuilder Motto and by Giacosa himself. Peculiar are the fairings of the front suspensions that Giacosa himself defines “aesthetic coquetry” as they are only suitable for masking the suspension parts, “neither useful nor practical for racing”.
The Cisitalia 202 is particularly important to automotive history both because it was the first car in the world to be permanently exhibited in a modern art museum, the MoMA in New York, and because it can be considered the first example of the postwar Italian-style granturismo.
