We're All Going On A Roman Holiday

It might look like something from the ‘Looney Tunes’ cartoon series, but the new, smartened-up version of the pint-sized Fiat 500, the Abarth Rivale, is a hot hatchback

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IN 1955, round about the time that Dante Giacosa was designing Italy’s answer to the people’s car—the Fiat Cinquecento—and Alec Issigonis was sketching the Mini on a napkin, Nikolaus Pevsner set about defining the characteristics of English art. His starting point was the difference between the English term ‘mutton chop’ and the Italian ‘costolette di montone’. The Italian version sounded like a whole line of poetry, he said, but the Englishness of English art was all there in that syllable ‘chop’.

Issigonis was a Greek immigrant, so that might blow my caras-art theory out of the water, but something of Britain’s phlegmatism and maritime climate must have washed over him by then, because, although both are wheel-at-each-corner kind of cars, the little Fiat was all costolette and the Mini all chop. Exactly as the Mini did, the Fiat 500 sold like hot sfogliatella: this side of a Vespa, nothing quite defines an Italian street like a little Fiat 500.