[iicarJohn]

I cannot yet say which was the first Giulietta Sprint to the USA. Hoffman was not the only importer of Alfa Romeo cars ... even if Hoffman seemed to be perhaps the most "official" at the time. There was Rezzaghi on the West Coast and there were private individuals as well, such as Henry Wessells who imported AR1493-00668 from Paris in August of 1955, apparently before Hoffman Motors received their "first car"? But, I would also not place a lot of trust in all the named "first customers" or dealers in any listing. This was a time when records do not always tell the whole truth even when part of the truth is being told. A car might be sold nominally to a dealer in one location to satisfy an allotment when it was implied or mandated that the car was actually supposed to be delivered elsewhere. This is not to say that every car should be considered an exception, but I would say that almost every car could have been an exception.

A few years ago, I saw a very early Giulietta Sprint with a well-known vendor/dealer in Italy. It appeared to be a conserved car rather than restored. It bore chassis AR1493*00002 and yet had a "lightweight" body number "77201". Taken at face value, the implication would be that it was a very early prototype that was bodied/rebodied in 1957 with a then-current Bertone body. Although there is a possibility that the car was using a previously unused number, the paperwork with the car stated that it was essentially a "used" car in 1958, but had a new certificate of origin. It was owned by SpA Edoardo Weber (the carburetor company) and was registered at that time in Bologna. The Weber company did not sell it until 1961. Who knows how long they had it before the "convenient" Cd'O date of 15 July 1958 was applied? If this paperwork is correct, as I believe it very likely is, and based on what I've seen of other early cars, the implications are that we should consider the entire early production of Alfa Romeo Giulietta "production" as being occasionally "corrupted" by special events and that general assumptions might be completely invalid if we pretend that they should be taken literally for each and every car.

The Giulietta was certainly the "next step" (after the Alfa 1900) in Alfa Romeo's path to becoming a true volume producer, but the transition was not as cut-and-dried as we might like to think. The Giuletta came at a time when volume production began/continued to change considerably from what had come before. Bertone and Pinin Farina were also revising their production methods at the time and the Giulietta very likely made this revamp not only possible but necessary. This means that a good portion of early Giulietta production should probably be considered "artigianale" even if we tend to think "cookie cutter" based on our generally greater experience with the later cars.