Some cars go down in history for their technological or stylistic innovations. Others deserve to be remembered for the role they have played in the daily life of an entire generation or an entire country. Few succeed in combining the two: technology and sentiment. They leave an indelible mark, becoming a sort of icon of their age.

The Nuova 500 is one of these. In a career lasting 18 years, from 1957 to 1975, exactly 3,893,294 were built, and it helped Italians and numerous other Europeans to satisfy the need for individual mobility that began to gain momentum from the early 1950s. The Nuova 500, even more than the 600 (1955), also brought the end of the post-war emergency period for motorisation and the automotive industry in Italy, and the start of the striving for comfort, albeit minimal and economical. With the Nuova 500, and its four popular wheels, the country of the Poor but beautiful became, or tried to be, not quite as poor (and to a certain extent it succeeded), but above all, able to move around more freely.

The Nuova 500 also concluded the rebirth of Fiat and of its product range, after the devastation of the Second World War. Dante Giacosa, the father’ of the Nuova 500, but also of the previous 500 Topolino and of numerous other models, said in his book ‘Progetti alla Fiat prima del computer' (Design at Fiat before the computer), that when the 500 was launched on July 4, 1957, Fiat ‘realised its programme of renewing its models, to replace those born before the Second World War’.

At two-year intervals, the Fiat 1400, 1900, 1100 – 103, 600, Nuova 500 and their model derivatives were launched on the international market. In just 10 years, Fiat had conceived and begun manufacture of four completely new basic models that had their roots in the technological culture that had grown up in its own offices and laboratories. No Italian or foreign model influenced the development of these projects.
 

It may seem overly emphatic to underline this fact today, but it was utterly comprehensible at the time, in the late 1940s and 1950s, when Lancia and Alfa Romeo both operated autonomously in Italy and were therefore Fiat’s competitors, whereas abroad, in Germany, and above all in the United States, the domestic industry still seemed to be one step ahead in many ways.

Dante Giacosa also wrote about the launch of the Nuova 500 and said that the ‘Press Office, run by Gino Pestelli assisted by the hyperactive Mariuccia Rubiolo, wanted me to collaborate on the advertising launch’. Once the name ‘Nuova 500 had been chosen to recall the famous Topolino’, the message soon followed, with a slogan that claimed: ‘twenty years after the original 500 (the Topolino was launched in 1936), on a similar wave of success, here comes the Nuova 500, completely new, modern, less expensive, more economical, a worthy successor to the world’s first runabout, built by Fiat’. Giacosa also revealed that the term ‘Big little car’ was also coined at Mirafiori, but the pragmatic engineer commented that ‘people just called it the 500’.

Fifty years after that Summer of 1957, in an age when television is even available on mobile phones, with shots and reports from all over the universe, it is entertaining to read that ‘the launch was held in great style. National television installed itself in the Mirafiori workshop on a boiling hot evening in July, and even I was invited for a live interview on the assembly line.’ 18 years after that ‘boiling hot evening in July’, during which time almost 3.9 million cars were built, another very hot day dawned, August 4, 1975, the day on which the ‘last’ car, at least of the 1957-75 Nuova Fiat 500 series, was built, not at Mirafiori but at the SicilFiat plant in Termini Imerese (Palermo).