Revenge in Italy – doesn’t that conjure up images of Machiavelli and the Duchess of Malfi?

Revenge has always been seen as the special ingredient, a cliché almost, in the fictional and maybe not so fictional stories and histories of Italian families and dynasties. Authors Orsini and Zagari use the word in the title of their book on OSCA to describe the activities of this little company at their factory in Bologna during the 1950s.

But before we explore that, it is important to define what was OSCA. It was yet another Italian car constructor to use an acronym for its title. In this case the letters stood for Officine Specializzate Costruzioni Automobili (Specialised workshop for car construction). I’ve often fondly imagined the management of companies from Fiat to Siata, from Alfa to ATS, sitting down after a few glasses of wine and dreaming their titles up between them. They needed to be inventive as not only did the titles have to mean something but they had to sound right in their abbreviated form as well.