The Abarth Allemano Spyder is about as curiously 1950s Italian as you can get. Carlo Abarth, of course, made his name and his fortune by taking vast numbers of Fiats and turning them into race or high performance road cars. He was so good at this, that the name Fiat often disappeared from the creation altogether, and on many of his machines, there was a lot more Abarth than Fiat.
While many of the Fiat-based saloon cars had relatively standard or slightly modified bodywork, some of the cars were sent (in the grand Italian tradition) to one of the Carosserie for quite special bodies to be built. Abarth made very considerable use of Zagato for this purpose, as did Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Maserati and Fiat, as well as a number of non-Italian manufacturers. Zagato, however, was not just a body builder, and the multi-generation company was often deeply involved in the design of a whole model in conjunction with the original manufacturer.
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