115 years of Alfa Romeo - congratulations!
06/24/2025
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Today marks the anniversary of the start of the car manufacturer Alfa Romeo, founded on June 24, 1910 as "A.L.F.A" in Milan. The acronym stood for "Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili" and it became Alfa Romeo as early as 1920. We recently reported on Nicola Romeo , the man who made the difference.
But instead of repeating the history of Alfa Romeo here (starting with the "15 HP" from 1911 (picture above) and extending to the modern Alfa Romeo 33 sports car), we would simply like to congratulate him and publish a few personal notes on the brand.
Long before I was in a position to buy a car myself, I was impressed by the products of the Alfa Romeo brand. In my neighborhood, for example, there was a 1750 Berlina, and a local businessman owned a Montreal. And when I reached driving age myself, I persuaded my father to swap his Datsun for a brown Alfasud. So I was able to sort five forward gears at a young age, something that was by no means "courant normal" at the beginning of the 1980s.
A schoolmate received an Alfa Romeo Spider 2000 as a present for his 18th birthday and he actually let me take the wheel once. This experience left its mark on me and made me even more enthusiastic about the brand from Milan.
When I was finally able to buy my own first car, it was of course an Alfa Romeo. However, the dark blue Alfasud Ti 1.5 did not only bring me joyful experiences, which is why I replaced it with the even more attractive Alfasud Sprint Veloce 1.5 (what a name!).
Incidentally, it was brown and not red, a rather unusual color for an Alfa.
After the Sprint, I was abstinent for quite a while and it was seven years before another Alfa Romeo product landed in my garage. This time it was a 164 with the famous Busso V6 and actually in red. I lost the joy of it a little when the throttle cable got stuck on the German autobahn, at a brisk pace, no less.
The next Alfa break lasted 11 years, after which I bought a silver-blue Alfa Romeo 147, which gave me my first experience with robotized manual transmissions. This transmission solution was called Selespeed, and it didn't quite convince me. After driving just over 2500 km, I sold the Alfasud successor again.
At least that was the end of my Alfa Romeo everyday car story. A few years ago, however, I finally gave myself an (again red) Alfa Romeo GTV6, which I still drive today (far too little).
All in all, I have been involved in the history of Alfa Romeo to some extent, but there are still a few wishes that remain unfulfilled. For example, I would love to get behind the wheel of an Alfa Romeo 33 Stradale from the late sixties. And despite several attempts to buy one of the beautiful fastback spiders, I have never managed to do so due to various circumstances. But who knows, maybe I'll be able to share a success story on the occasion of the brand's 125th birthday ...
