GIORGETTO GIUGIARO

He was crowned Designer of the Century in 1999. Now it's time for the great Giugiaro to look back on his stellar career

- Words Massimo Delbò

OF ALL THE cars this fabled designer is responsible for, his favourite may or may not surprise you. It's the archly utilitarian Fiat Panda. But we'll get to that.

'It is somehow easy,' he says, 'to create a car when you have few technical impositions and a generous budget. To be successful without money to spend and within endless constraints, well, that is a completely different challenge.'

We meet Giugiaro at his GFG Architettura building in Moncalieri, on the outskirts of Turin (GFG being the initials of Giorgetto and son Fabrizio). But to better understand the man behind the creation of some of the most admired cars of the 20th Century, we must first look back. Giugiaro was born in 1938 in Garessio, a village of 3000 inhabitants about 100km south of Turin, within a few months of Marcello Gandini and Leonardo Fioravanti. He comes from a family of artists, who worked as painters decorating interiors with frescoes. His father soon spotted the young Giorgetto’s talent but, being a practical man, steered him towards a technical school.

'My father was a very pragmatic artist and realised that in the postwar years in Italy there was little to spend on decorating houses or for art. He saw a future for me at the technical drawing school in Turin. He was right, though his plan was disrupted. He discovered that I was skipping lessons when I was 14, preferring to escape with my friends instead of studying, so he enrolled himself in the class, too.

Then came an intervention. 'My teacher, who was the uncle of