Alfa Romeo Giulia Single Generation

Alfa Romeo styled the Giulia in-house at the Centro Stile, Giuseppe Scarnati working under studio chief Ivo Colucci and project director Orazio Satta Puliga, and the shape was engineering before it was fashion. An earlier, sleeker prototype was scrapped after the team saw its ideas anticipated at the 1959 London show, and the replacement was developed in the Turin Polytechnic wind tunnel: low blunt nose, side glass curved into the cabin, and a chopped Kamm tail out of Wunibald Kamm's 1930s research. The result was a drag coefficient of 0.34, unheard of for a small sedan, and Alfa's launch slogan owned it: L'ha disegnata il vento, the wind designed it. The press flinched anyway, Quattroruote finding the details overwrought, and time has been the better judge. The body also carried differentiated-strength structure, a reinforced cell with energy-absorbing ends, years before crumple zones had a name. The details reward knowing: the stepped bonnet and scalloped roof, the Bollino d'Oro gold badge and later Biscione serpent on Super C-pillars, and the 1974 Nuova Super's flat bootlid, which deleted the characteristic centre spine and marks the final form at a glance.

The Giulia went racing sixty days into its life as a class of one, and the TI Super made it official. Presented at Monza in April 1963, it was the road car rebuilt for Turismo racing: 910kg dry, twin Weber 45s, 112hp, discs, and magnesium wheels. Before homologation it won its category on the 1963 Tour de France and finished fourth among the GTs behind three Ferraris. FIA papers came on 2 May 1964, and Autodelta-prepared cars run through Milan's Jolly Club campaigned the European Touring Car Challenge, with outright wins as far away as the 1964 Sandown Park 6 Hour in Australia. The deeper legacy is what came next: Carlo Chiti carried the TI Super's lightweight lessons straight into the GTA program, and the coupe cousin took the European Touring Car Challenge in 1966 and 1967 with Andrea de Adamich. The sedan's other career was pursuit. Italy's police forces ran Giulias hard for a decade, and the early cars wore mesh over the inner headlight openings for a practical reason: it let the siren behind them sound louder. Every Alfa touring car victory of the sixties traces back to this floorpan.

In Italy the Giulia is not just a car, it is the car the law drove. The Polizia's cars were Panthers (Pantera) and the Carabinieri's were Gazelles (Gazzella), thousands of them across the sixties and seventies, and their two-tone liveries and roof beacons made the Giulia the default image of an Italian chase. That image went global in 1969, when The Italian Job sent Giulia police cars scrambling after three gold-laden Minis, and Italian cinema ran with it for a decade: the Giulia is a fixture of the seventies poliziotteschi crime films and turns up in early Dario Argento. The legend that the police cars were secret TI Supers is exactly backwards, and better than the truth would be: they were standard Giulias, driven brilliantly, and only two TI Supers ever wore a uniform, both at police driving schools. The car carries a gentler association too, as the respectable sedan of boom-years Italy, the machine in the background of a thousand family photographs. When Alfa Romeo revived the Giulia name for its 2015 sports sedan, it was reaching for exactly this well of memory.

Rank them like this. The TI Super of 1963-64 stands alone: 501 built for homologation, twin Weber 45s and 112hp, magnesium wheels, mesh grilles where the inner headlights had been, green quadrifoglios on the wings, and every car white except one red and one grey. Then the Giulia Super, from 1965: the TI Super's twin-Weber induction in a civilised 98hp tune (102 from 1969), the definitive version and the one to drive. The original 1600 TI is the purist's period piece, with its column-shift five-speed, split bench and strip speedometer. The 1300 TI outsold everything (more than 140,000 built) and revs just as sweetly on less money. The Nuova Super of 1974-77, with its flat bootlid and plastic grille, is the honest cheap way in. The Nuova Super Diesel is the oddity: Alfa's first diesel passenger car, powered by a Perkins engine, the slowest Giulia ever made, around 6,500 built. One warning on provenance: police-liveried Pantera and Gazzella tributes are everywhere, genuine documented ex-police cars are rare, and despite the legend the police ran standard Giulias, not TI Supers.

Rust is the whole conversation. The Giulia is a thin-steel Italian unibody, and it corrodes in the floors, sills, spring seats and around the suspension mountings, where it becomes structural. Buy on metal, not paint, and everything after that is manageable. The alloy twin cam is long-lived on two conditions: frequent oil changes and antifreeze that actually gets changed, because stale coolant corrodes the waterways, clogs cooling and takes the head gasket with it. Steering box casings crack, and replacements cost real money. Cars that sit develop seized calipers and internally corroded servos and master cylinders, all rebuildable. Gearbox synchros wear and layshafts get noisy with age, which is the classic big-ticket job. Wiring goes brittle after sixty years and deserves inspection before it deserves trust. What softens all of this is the car's temperament: nothing here is exotic, nothing requires a dealer computer, and a sorted Giulia is among the most usable sixties classics there is, a genuine four-seat, motorway-capable car you can drive to work in the week and tour in on the weekend. Owners will tell you the maintenance is part of the relationship, and with this car they mean it fondly.