10 breath-taking Alfa Romeos

Throughout their 111-year history, Italian carmakers Alfa Romeo have produced some astonishingly beautiful cars; some awesomely potent ones; and a select few that have managed to marry both elegance and power.

Here are some of our very favourite Alfas from the company's illustrious history. Warning: high amounts of automotive beauty to follow. If you’re lucky enough to own one of these classics, make sure it’s protected with specialist classic Alfa Romeo insurance.

1. 8C
   

   Not to be confused with the much later 8C Competizione, the original 8C designation (given, as you're probably expecting, for the eight cylinders under the bonnet) spanned quite a few 1930s and 1940s Alfas, from large opulent saloons to pared-down roadsters and racers. What they all had in common, though, were looks that stopped you in your tracks.

Our favourite might be the gorgeous 2900A from 1935-36, with that prowling, rear-leaning stance, long, long bonnet, gently curving wheel arches that seem to go on forever, and the graceful teardrop grille that descends almost to the floor: the very essence of 1930s glitz and glamour.

It might look more suited to cruising along La Croisette in Cannes, but the large, comfortable 2900A proved itself a very competent racer: Scuderia Ferrari entered the car into the 1936 and 1937 instalments of the Mille Miglia road race, and took the top three positions the first year, and the top two the following year. This was a car, then, that did just what all great Alfas do well: look beautiful and shift rather well, thank you.

2. 158 / 159 Alfetta
   

   Here's another Alfa where beauty and imposing sporting dominance form a perfect union. Though already showing its age when it reached its peak, the Alfa Romeo 158/159 or Alfetta(Little Alfa) is one of motorsport's most successful cars of all time, triumphant in an incredible 47 of the 54 Grand Prix races it lined up for.

With its 1.5-litre, 8-cylinder engine, the Alfetta put out almost 200bhp, and was able to compete in the 'voiturette' class during its first year, 1938.

The Alfetta was then perfectly poised to enter the new Formula One class when the latter was introduced in 1950. Driven by the likes of Nino Farina and Juan Manuel Fangio, the 158 / 159, though a relatively old car by now, swept the board during F1's first two seasons. After that, undefeated, Alfa Romeo left Formula 1 to concentrate on production cars. Talk about quitting while you're ahead…

3. Giulietta / Giulia Sprint Speciale
   

   Designed by Franco Scaglione at the venerable design house Bertone, the Giulietta Sprint Speciale and its slightly larger-engined Giulia successor were among the 1960’s most desirable small sports cars, rivalling the likes of the Lotus Elan or Ferrari 250. The near-identical cars were beautiful to look at, mixing in a bit of MG / E-Type with a sprinkling of inimitable Italian style.

Those fabulous looks had function as well as form: the Sprint Speciale cars were supremely aerodynamic, managing a drag coefficient of just 0.28.

More potent versions soon emerged. Given the T.I. (turismo internazionale) abbreviation, these cars were designed to cover large distances, comfortably and at speed. Italy's various coachbuilders produced sporty coupe and 'spider' (convertible) variations on them: Pininfarina gave us the Spider, Bertone the Scaglione Sprint Speciale and Zagato the lightning quick Sprint Zagato, or SZ. Continuing a proud Alfa tradition, these cars saw success in motorsport: the Giulietta TI and SZ both imposed themselves on the Gran Turismo (GT) class.

4. 33 Stradale
   

   A mid-enginedsports carwith a V8 engine, the 33 Stradale was one of the world's first supercars, alongside the likes of the Ford GT40, Lamborghini Miura and Ferrari Daytona; with a top speed of 162mph, it was, when first introduced, the fastest commercially available car across a single kilometre.

Stradale is Italian for 'road-going', and the 33 Stradale was the street-legal version of Alfa's derived Tipo 33 sports prototype, which went on, in various guises, to win various Sports Cars World Championships from 1968 through to 1977.

Alongside its performance, the 33 Stradale is, for many, the epitome of automotive beauty – especially the early versions with their bulging wheel arches and long, graceful twin front headlamps that dropped down towards the ground, giving the car a prowling, tensed appearance. The car also spawned a series of incredibly adventurous and otherworldly prototypes during the heyday of the Italian wedge, including Marcello Gandini's extraordinary Carabo and, not to be outdone, Giorgetto Giugiaro's Maserati-like Iguana.

Just 18 Stradales were built from 1967 to 1969, making this car a quite impossibly valuable slice of automotive history nowadays. In fact, you won't find a price beside any Stradales offered for sale online – they'll simply be 'Price on Application'. We'll contain our envy at anyone able to get their hands on one of these priceless treasures, and limit ourselves to recommending some classic Alfa insurance!

5. Alfa Romeo Montreal

   Some cars just have a swagger about them, don't they? And the 1960s and 1970s produced more than their fair share of these strutting kings of the road. The second-generation Pontiac Firebird is one such, as is the Chevy Corvette Stingray. We'd add Alfa's Montreal to this select list.

The Montreal got its name from the Canadian city, where it was first introduced as a concept car in 1967. It hadn't yet been given a name, but the public started referring to it after the city where they'd first seen it – and the label stuck.

A four-seater coupé, the Montreal was designed by Marcello Gandini at Bertone, right in the middle of that extraordinary purple patch that also saw him dreaming up Lamborghini's Miura and Countach, Alfa's otherworldly Carabo, the Lancia Stratos and many others. A little apart from Gandini's other, more angular creations, the Montreal seems to draw on some of the muscle car looks of the cars we mentioned above – and from an era when American motoring was at its biggest, most extravagant and, for many, most beautiful.

Part of its brash beauty comes from the various slats, bulges and scoops that adorn its bodywork – including those delicious six slats behind each door, one of the most striking pieces of car design we've come across.

Montreal buyers could choose from 12 bright colours, including pumpkin orange and a vivid metallic gold. It was also the only production Alfa ever to feature a V8 engine. Being a good-looking bruiser, the Montreal had a fairly distinguished film career: Michael Caine drives one, in a very mid-70s metallic dark brown, in the 1974 thriller The Marseille Contract.

With Alfa a relatively small manufacturer and the Montreal unable to match the performance of some of the cars it found itself vying against (Jaguar E-Type, Porsche 911), the car only ran to some 3,900 examples. That, and the fact it’s undeniably cool, make it a hugely desirable classic nowadays. Anyone lucky enough to own one of these will surely have it covered with some good classic car cover.

6. Brera
   

   For us, the beautiful and also ever-so-slightly-menacing-looking Brera takes up the mantle of its Montreal predecessor, as an Alfa coupe with a bit of aggression to its looks, as opposed to the more classical beauty one might usually associate with the marque.

The world got its first look at the Brera in concept form, at 2002's Geneva Motor Show. The design was by Giorgetto Giugiaro, like Gandini an absolute icon of bold and beautiful Italian car design, and his Italdesign studio. That concept got a V8 Maserati engine and scissor doors: sadly, neither of these made their way into the production model, but the eye-catching Brera (and its Spider convertible derivative) suffered little.

It scooped the Most Beautiful Car in the World award at the 21st annual International Automobile Festival 2006, and if we'd been there, we'd certainly have been casting our vote the Brera's way. Incidentally, we'd be interested to know how many automobile beauty contests Alfas have won down the decades – a fair few, we'd imagine.

Approaching 20 years old now, the Brera is beginning to be a candidate for classic car insurance – so make sure you’re protecting any Brera or Spider in your possession.

7. 4C

Take one look at the Alfa Romeo 4C's supercar looks and you can't quite believe that the car has just four cylinders labouring away in its engine. However, the 4C revels in its relatively small engine size: mid-engined, lightweight, and rear-wheel drive, it has incredible agility, while its largely aluminium and carbon fibre body keeps its weight down at around 895kg. Its featherlight construction allows the 4C to make the 0-62mph sprint in a blistering 4.5 seconds, and to manage a top speed of 160mph.

But it's in our list not just because it shows what incredible feats can be achieved with just four cylinders. No, we've also got it in here because we love those looks. There may be echoes of both the Lotus Elise and the Lancia Stratos in there, but the end product (in particular that beautiful bonnet, tapering down towards the company's iconic badge) is quintessential Alfa.

8. Spider

Quite a few Alfas have borne the 'Spider' name – it means 'roadster' in Alfa parlance – but the most iconic of them must be the beautiful, simple open-top that went through four generations from 1996 to 1993.

The first generation is the one that's indelibly stamped on a nation's consciousness, after Dustin Hoffman drove a bright red version in the classic film The Graduate. The second generation, from the 1970s, might just pip its predecessor in the beauty stakes. All four generations, though, share a simple elegance, an unfussy sense of joy in motoring with the wind in your hair. They might be better suited to a cruise along the Amalfi coast than a drizzle-swept Staffordshire B-road, but for those rare occasions when the British weather does its stuff, there are few better places to be than behind the wheel of an Alfa Spider.

9. SZ

We're fascinated by those Alfa Romeo cars that step outside the brand's traditional DNA of beauty and elegance, and provide something just a little more… lairy. As we've seen already, the 1970s Montreal and Noughties Brera had a bit of this extra snarl and swagger… but the most aggressive-looking Alfa might be the 1989-91 Sprint Zagato, more commonly known as the SZ.

Some context: Fiat has acquired Alfa Romeo in 1986, and one of its first missions was to try and reclaim some of the brand's legendary sporting heritage. They wanted a car that would echo the sporting prestige of the Giulietta Sprint Zagato of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The SZ had input, once again, from the design house Zagato, who've always been closely linked with Alfa Romeo. Now, Zagato have always done their own thing, so at a time when most car makers were moving away from the wedge towards more organic shapes, Zagato once again ploughed its own furrow, creating this stubby coupe with its raised backside. Some car-watchers labelled the SZ 'il mostro', 'the monster', and its looks are certainly… challenging. We think, though, that as a piece of typically bold Italian design innovation, and when married with high performance and legendarily fine handling, the SZ gets away with it.

10. 1900C SS Coupe Zagato

Some more Zagato brilliance to round things off. Elio Zagato, son of the design firm's founder Ugo, was a racing car enthusiast. In the early 1950s, he had taken a look at Alfa Romeo’s 1900C chassis, and the company's 115bhp, two-litre engine, and decided that he could have some fun. In September 1954, Zagato got hold of a 1900C chassis and built a lightweight aluminium frame over it.

Alfa Romeo ended up building over 21,000 cars on the 1900C chassis – of which just 854 became the ultra-sporty 1900C SS and, within that total, just 39 got Elio Zagato's bespoke aluminium body. These models were arrestingly fast, thanks to their lightweight body. They were also, as befitting their Alfa parentage, astonishingly beautiful to look at, with that sloping rear and those delicate bonnet scoops. Form and function married together, and an encapsulation of everything that made, and still makes, Alfa Romeo the wonderful carmaker it is today.

Insuring your classic with Lancaster

Do you own one of the beautiful classic Alfa Romeos we've mentioned here, or a different classic vehicle? Whatever your vintage motor of choice, we recommend that you protect your treasured possession with some insurance for your classic car.

And, here at Lancaster, we will be able to tailor the insurance package to suit you. With 35 years' experience in the classic car insurance industry, we are able to provide quotes for a vast range of vehicles – even those hard to insure.

Contact us for a quote today.

Policy benefits, features and discounts offered may very between insurance schemes or cover selected and are subject to underwriting criteria. Information contained within this article is accurate at the time of publishing but may be subject to change.