The Alfa Romeo that we love has been an industry pilot, in step with the times, always at the forefront, always in advance.
Not only when his cars had preceded from several years the public’s tastes and the demands of the market, or when Alfa was building in Arese a plant modern in structure and architectural line or when it opened in Balocco – in the middle of the rice fields – a test-track touted as a masterpiece of engineering, but also when studying a signboard, a poster, or when Alfa was printing a magazine or a brochure, or when preparing trophies for its huge and never forgotten pilots.
In 1963, whilst the world’s top pilots were driving SZ , GTA or 33 and they were winning everything there was to win, it took light – from the brainchild of Giuseppe Luraghi and Leonardo Sinisgalli – the initiative to coin a series of sculptures, as a prize for the riders and gentlemen drivers who did honor to the Alfa’s colors.
A vanguard manufacturer as was Alfa Romeo in these times, decided to reward his champions neither with dingy old diplomas on parchment junk paper nor with anonymous old silver cups, and so – for a few years from 1963 to 1982 – the Alfa managers resorted to world-renowned artists such as Lucio Fontana, Giò Pomodoro, Luciano Minguzzi, Emilio Greco, Andrea Cascella, Bruno Munari, Agenore Fabbri – just to name a few of the most famous – to prepare all the trophies that were given to the pilots winners of various categories in Europe and worldwide.
Trophies and sculptures that have today become real objects of cult.
The trophies were signed, one by one, by the artists
The champions greeted immediately with sympathy and wit the new symbols, either because they represented a small collection of Art and not a collection of knick-knacks, either because they had a great value in itself, not only for the recognition they wanted to mean.
Among the winners of those years, the “aristocracy” of the world motorsports world: Andrea De Adamich, Ignazio Giunti, Nino Vaccarella, Piers Courage, Toine Hezemans, Rolf Stommelen, Ronnie Peterson, Vic Elford, Henry Pescarolo, Helmut Marko, Peter Revson, Gijs Van Lennep, Clay Regazzoni, Arturo Merzario, Jody Schekter, Jacky Ickx, Jacques Laffite, Mario Andretti, John Watson, Michele Alboreto and many other unforgotten and unforgettable champions who have inextricably linked their name with … the “alchemical- technological” four-leaf clover.
Reports between Art and Industry have now become more and more close, and even the Art seems to have borrowed from the industry creative methodology. Even the work of Art can be born from a project and by a Team work.
The Alfa Romeo trophies are not therefore conventional symbols or searched oddities.
They were the result of avant-garde Art, they were happy image of a great industry projected towards the future; and even today these trophies contain together all the gratitude, admiration, sympathy and confidence that make indissoluble the link between Alfa Romeo and his brave champions all over the world.
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