OK, here's my story in a little more detail.
I finished my PhD work in 1961, and my wife and I spent the summer in San Jose,
where I worked at IBM. We had saved a little money and with the money I made at
IBM we had enough to buy a Giulietta Spider Normale but not a Veloce.
My wife's father worked at PG&E in San Francisco and could walk down to Rezzaghi Motors during his lunch break. He brokered a deal in which we could buy the car --- for
$2,200 I am pretty sure --- complete with Italian export registration (EE plates)
if we could pick up the car just across the border in Lugano, Switzerland. Mr. Rezzaghi had a horse farm in the hills above Palo Alto. One Sunday, all of us went up there, and I gave him a check for the car, and he gave me some sort of receipt. I had a fellowship for a postdoc in Rome. We took a boat from Boston to Naples, the train to Rome to find a place to stay for a while, then the train to Lugano, and there the car was ready for us.