The Last Italian Design House
The Italian coachbuilding industry has been diminishing in importance and influence for a long time now, with disastrous consequences for the few well-known firms that have not simply disappeared. One might expect that prospects for the oldest of them all, Carrozzeria Bertone (founded in 1912), would be as precarious as for the others. And Bertone was indeed teetering on the edge a few years ago.
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Production contracts had dried up as manufacturers took niche models into their own production schemes, design contracts were fewer as carmakers established their own internal design departments, and some brave efforts, such as BMW's semi-enclosed C1 motorcycles that Bertone assembled, simply didn't sell.
Folk wisdom in Europe holds that when an inspired, dedicated leader creates a family enterprise, the second generation often is able to perpetuate, even expand, the business, building on the solid base established by the founder, only to have the third generation, coddled from birth and never having had to work really hard, dissipate all that had been built up over the decades.
When Giuseppe "Nuccio" Bertone, son of founder Giovanni, died in 1997 at 82, his succession followed the classic European family business pattern: direction should stay in the family, and it should be male. Except the shrewd Nuccio and his charming wife, Lilli, had only two offspring, Barbara and Marie-Jeanne, both pleasant young women not particularly qualified for or interested in manufacturing, so it fell to the daughters and their husbands, the sons-in-law, to take on the almost inevitable task of slow destruction. Through mismanagement andmisappreciation of the industry and business climate, they came quite close to succeeding. Carrozzeria Bertone, the series-production factory, was lost, and some of the subsidiary businesses that the farsighted Nuccio had created were in difficulty. Italian newspapers followed the ugly drama attentively, and it was widely expected that it would all collapse.
Various vultures and scoundrels wanted to "save Bertone," if one were to give credence to articles appearing in Automotive News, but things were declining desperately. Press-release battles among different factions took place, and there was the sad spectacle of Bertone's not taking its traditional stand at the Geneva motor show in 2008, instead exhibiting a trumped-up and unconvincing BAT 11 concept at an off-site venue in the Swiss city. It seemed hopeless, and those of us who consider Bertone to be the finest and most innovative of all the Italian design houses feared the worst. Many of the best people moved on, concerned that the turmoil would end not just the fabled firm but also their own careers.
What ultimately counted, though, was the steely determination of Lilli Bertone. She had promised her beloved husband before he died that she would see the firm through to its one-hundredth anniversary. As a woman in her sixties, she had naturally called on her daughters, but when she saw disaster looming, she fought like a tigress to wrest control from the feckless, unqualified men who didn't understand what Nuccio had always told her: that the money in the bank he had so carefully saved did not belong to them personally but to the firm and its safe future.
So, at the 2010 Geneva show, Bertone was back with an absolutely astonishing concept car, one that in the tradition of the glory years was a complete running vehicle. The Pandion, executed as an homage to the 100 years of Alfa Romeo, was a perfect symbol of the resurgence of Bertone. In 2009, after years of squabbles and skirmishes, Lilli Bertone gained complete control of five companies carrying her late husband's name: Stile Bertone, Bertone Glass, Bertone Engineering, Bertone Energia, and Bertone ITC, the latter involved with the integration of electronics and communications technologies in the automobile.
She has also created the nonprofit Bertone Foundation, dedicated to the heritage of the firm and to supporting the work of young creative people, which had been the hallmark of Nuccio's career. He found and developed the abilities of Franco Scaglione, Giorgetto Giugiaro, Marcello Gandini, Marc Deschamps, and many other less-renowned designers, always giving them due credit. That each of these men, viewed retrospectively, did his best work under Bertone's direction says a great deal about his own taste and prescience.
Bear in mind that Bertone had collaborated with Alfa Romeo for seventy-five years, during that time having created thirteen fabulous Alfa concept cars and ten production models, several of which were series-built in Carrozzeria Bertone's own shops. The timeless Giulietta coupe (featured in my By Design column in January 2008) that put Bertone into full-scale manufacturing in the 1950s was the first of these.
