A small, pretty, red sports car. Alfa Romeo hasn’t made one in a while, yet that will likely be the first thing to pop into any enthusiast’s mind whenever the brand is mentioned.
But while that certainly is no bad thing, there’s a lot more to Alfa Romeo than that. From semi-trucks to delivery vans, there’s hardly anything on four (or more) wheels that Alfa’s engineers haven’t tackled at least once over the company’s long and tumultuous history. Up to and including a military off-roader whose nickname is a story in itself: “Matta,” which is Italian for “Mad.”
To understand how Alfa Romeo got there, though, we must go back to the late 1940s, when the Italians were busy picking up the pieces after World War II.
As the Allied forces left the country, they left behind many of the trucks, motorcycles, and, of course, the Jeeps that were brought in to support the war effort. After all, it made little sense to go to the trouble to repatriate material that was now surplus to requirements and, in most cases, rather worse for wear. But one man’s junk is another man’s treasure, and that was very much the case for those tired, battered Jeeps. In a country reduced to rubble, any vehicle that could be made to work was a very precious asset. So, after a fresh coat of paint, all those leftover U.S. Army Jeeps began a second life, keeping Italy’s fledgling post-war institutions mobile for years.
Still, as the 1950s dawned and the country was allowed to rearm as a U.S. ally in the new Cold War context, the Italian military brass saw the need for a homegrown replacement for the Jeep and turned to Fiat, the country’s largest industrial complex, for its development.
Work at Fiat’s design office went on swiftly, and by the time the Italian Ministry Of Defence made the “AR 51” procurement programme public in November of 1950, prototype testing was well underway. Done deal, then?
Well, not quite. Fiat enjoyed a significant head start, but Alfa Romeo’s managing director, Iginio Alessio, wasn’t keen on letting such a potentially lucrative contract go to a rival company. At least, not without a fight.
So, in December of 1950, Alessio instructed the engineer Giuseppe Busso to go out and create a competing vehicle from scratch. Busso had only a few months to do so but was given total freedom and a clear target: outrun, outclimb, and potentially outlast anything Fiat could come up with.
The result was the Alfa Romeo 1900 M, and, at first glance, it looked just like the many Jeep clones that were popping up all over the world at the time, only with the seven-slot grille replaced by one mimicking the Alfa “shield.” Look closer, though, and the fact that the 1900 M was designed by the same people responsible for the championship-winning 159 F1 single-seater soon becomes apparent.
At the front, Alfa’s off-roader sported independent suspensions with longitudinal torsion bar springs and rotary dampers. The latter was of the same type used on period F1 cars and not only could be adjusted via a screw but was fitted with an internal thermostat to maintain the setting as the oil inside heated. The rear end was a traditional solid axle, a copy of that used on early Land Rovers. Still, the driver could lock the rear differential via a lever on the transmission tunnel, a feature not yet available on Land Rovers at the time.
But it’s under the bonnet that the Alfa’s specification goes, by the standards of 1950s off-road vehicles, beyond the surprisingly sophisticated to become downright exotic.
As he didn’t have the time to develop an entirely new engine, Giuseppe Busso stuck with what was available in-house: the 1.9-liter inline-four from the 1900 sedan, complete with its aluminium double overhead cam cylinder head. Horsepower went down from 80 to 65, though, as the engine was tuned for low-down torque and its compression ratio was reduced to use lower-octane fuel. The revised engine also gained a dry-sump lubrication system to prevent oil starvation when the vehicle was inclined at a steep angle.
Of course, all that good stuff didn’t come cheap, so it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that costs came to prove the 1900 M’s undoing.
Alfa’s 1900 M comprehensively beat Fiat’s rival vehicle, the Campagnola, in every test, but the price gap between the two was simply too large for the military brass to ignore. All Alfa Romeo got in exchange for its effort were a few small, token orders, while Fiat went home with the big prize.
Still, Alfa Romeo got at least some revenge during the 1952 edition of the Mille Miglia, the first and only one to include a specific class for military vehicles. Two Fiat Campagnola and two Alfa Romeo 1900 M, driven by active military personnel, took part in what was supposed to be a largely ceremonial endeavour. As it’s easy to imagine, though, it didn’t take long for each driver’s competitive spirit to take over, and soon enough, the servicemen began flogging their vehicles for all they were worth. One of the Alfas crashed out of the race, but the other got to the finish line after 16 hours and 54 minutes, 41 minutes ahead of the first Fiat.
Between 1951 and 1953, Alfa Romeo ultimately built just over 2000 examples of the 1900 M, as it was called in all the drawings and service literature. But, of course, nobody ever calls it that way.
As Alfa’s managing director, Iginio Alessio, observed the vehicle climbing over seemingly impassable terrain during a test session, he reportedly exclaimed something along the lines of: “Roba da matti” (“That’s insane”). The name immediately stuck, and this most unusual of Alfa Romeos has been known as the “Matta” ever since.
Unloved and mostly forgotten for decades, the “Matta” has recently become quite coveted by the most serious Alfa Romeo collectors, many of whom are more than willing to part with non-trivial amounts of money to get their hands on one of the most unlikely vehicles ever to wear the Alfa badge.
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Matteo Licata received his degree in Transportation Design from Turin’s IED (Istituto Europeo di Design) in 2006. He worked as an automobile designer for about a decade, including a stint in the then-Fiat Group’s Turin design studio, during which his proposal for the interior of the 2010–20 Alfa Romeo Giulietta was selected for production. He next joined Changan’s European design studio in Turin and then EDAG in Barcelona, Spain. Licata currently teaches automobile design history to the Transportation Design bachelor students of IAAD (Istituto di Arte Applicata e Design) in Turin.
