A Car of My Dreams - The Fiat 2300 Familiare

I recently wrote about how and why I craved a Fiat 2300, and, by pure chance, one is being sold by Anglia Car Auctions in November. Better still, this 1967 example is the even more exclusive Familiare estate version, in RHD form, and is possibly the only surviving version in the UK with optional automatic transmission.

So, will this car, once described by Fiat as possessing “Comfort and style are such that five can travel in limousine luxury to a hunt ball”, grace my driveway? Almost certainly not. For one, my Wolseley 6/99 is more than enough to cope with; for another, the auction price will probably be several thousand pounds more than I can afford. More importantly, my partner has hinted that I will be dead or deceased if I ever buy another car.

So, owning the Familiare is another pipe dream, along with re-enacting the chase scene from The Fast Lady in my 6/99. But it raises the question of when and why my fascination with the 2300 family commenced. As a child of the 1970s, the 500 was the commonly encountered Fiat of the previous decade. I would occasionally see the 2300 saloon, but I cannot recall ever meeting the estate version.

My guess is that television viewing is essentially to blame. Fiats such as the unmarked Carabinieri 2300 saloon in the 1966 Peter Sellers vehicle After The Fox clearly impacted my young mind. The dark-coloured version in the ITC series The Adventurer was a welcome relief from the leading man’s disastrous wardrobe. When older, there was also the 1968 B-feature The Big Switch with its white Fiat 2300 and gangsters literally skidding across an ice-strewn Brighton Peir.

For these reasons, plus any number of Italian films, the 2300 established itself as my epitome of affordable glamour: La Dolce Vita on four wheels. I avidly read The Motor’s report on the Familiare - “smooth, quiet, fast, extravagantly equipped and meticulously finished” - and Clive James’s account of his travels through Italy when he was an undergraduate:

After a night at the Antica Cervia I humped our two bags out to the autostrada and we hitched south to Rome. The driver was a gentleman who had a kind word for my Italian as well as Françoise’s. That did me the world of good. I forget what make the car was, but in a quiet way of business it was a road-eater. It wasn’t an Alfa or I would have remembered. Though the Alfas were fast, they floated sideways on their suspension and had to be steered all the time. This car ran like a train. Probably it was the big Fiat, the one with four headlights.

So, I hope the white Familiare goes to a good home. For me, owning a car with a strip speedometer, a steering column gear change and a hand throttle would still be vicariously joining a world of style, elegance and wearing sunglasses indoors. And the fact that one of my favourite writers approved of the 2300 makes it all the more desirable.

With Thanks To: Anglia Car Auctions