Fiat 500f – Beige Sabbia

Fiat 500 Nuova F — Genova, Savona, and Back Again

Some cars are remembered for what they are. Others are remembered for where they have been. This Fiat 500 Nuova F belongs to the second kind.

The Cinquecento was never built to impress anyone. It was built to move a country: to carry families up hills too steep for anything larger, through streets too narrow for anything wider, at a moment when owning a car in Italy was still something new. The F series, introduced in 1965, is the shape most of the world now pictures when it thinks of the 500. Sixty years later it has lost none of its cheerfulness, and none of its usefulness either.

We found this one in the streets of Genova, finished in Bianco 233. The body has been resprayed and the interior reupholstered since, so it presents far better than most cars that have quietly stayed in one family for decades.

Its history is really the history of one family. The car was bought new by its first owner, who not long afterwards left for the United States with the Italian army. His wife remained behind, and the little Fiat remained with her. When she moved to Savona, the car moved too, exchanging its Genova plates for Savona ones. Years later it passed to their daughter, who took it back to Genova, where it had started. Same family, same car, two cities, and a Savona plate that still quietly gives the whole story away.

That is the thing about a 500. It is small enough, cheap enough and useful enough to stay in a family rather than be traded away, and so it ends up carrying decades of ordinary life that a more valuable car never would. Registration plates change, drivers change, cities change. The car keeps going.

It has now found a new home in Amsterdam. Narrow streets, short distances, canals and bridges — it is hard to imagine a more fitting or more entertaining city for it, or a car better suited to that city.

This one was sold before we had the chance to put it online, so we are showing it here instead. To its new owner: many happy kilometres, and many more stories to add to the ones it already carries..

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