Monteverdi: The Swiss Who Loved Italy

Edited by Vita di Stile

Words by Manuel Bordini

There was a decade in which the worldwide motoring flair and genius were at the top, achieving levels of sublime elegance. In that years, the sensitivity and the ideas of designers, car body designers and engineers, who worked together, mutually affecting each other, contributed to the realization of unique end products.

It was not a case that Giulio Alfieri, one of the most brilliant mind of the time, wrote about Pietro Frua on the occasion of his death: “with his death I lose the person who better has known how to interpret the spirit of the factory for which he worked and he enhanced those cars I engineered.”

Indeed, cars like Ghibli, IsoGrifo, Monteverdi 375 S, Mangusta, Miura wouldn’t have come into being without the multiple combined effort of both creatives and creators.

The story of Peter Monteverdi, born in Switzerland but always linked to Italy, can be inserted in this context.

Peter Monteverdi, whose father was Italian, was born in Benningen not far from Basel in 1934. Once graduated, he started to work in his father’s workshop. It was this place which had a major influence on him, indeed, there, when he was sixteen, he built up his first vehicle and later, in 1965 he understood that there were the conditions to transform the family business into a true car atelier.

However, coming back to his personal life, when he was 22, he was well known as “talented race driver”, who used to drive Ferrari racing cars. For that reason, Enzo Ferrari gave him the exclusive right to sell Ferrari cars in Switzerland: so that he became the youngest Ferrari dealer of the world. Then, he started to deal with other illustrious brands such as Bentley, Lancia, Jensen too. However, in that period, he began to experience something different, he wanted more, he wanted to create something in line with his sensitivity and vision: Monteverdi High Speed 375S was born.

It was precisely Pietro Frua who realized the body shell of the new-born Monteverdi and designed the 375S in a way that it remembered the Maserati Ghibli, the car marking the beginning of the supercar era.

Concerning the choice of the engine, Monteverdi opted for the American solution (in that case the Chrysler’s one). The main aspects influencing this choice were: first of all the horse power, then the great machine torque, finally a good reliability and market; while, however the design was entrusted to the great Italian car body designers.

Selling results agreed with Peter’s intuition, indeed every year a new model of car was launched and the High Speed series completed with the 375L, 375/4 L (they can be considered as competitors of the coeval fab three Iso Rivolta, Fidia, Maserati Quattroporte and De Tomaso Deauville and the HAI 450 SS).

Nevertheless, unluckily, not all beautiful stories have the happy ending. When the oil crisis started to reach everything without any distinctions, Monteverdi had an intuition: he converted his atelier into a boutique and started the production of “Monteverdi version” of cars already on the market. This process concerned for example the Monteverdi Sahara and Safari, which gained an enormous success, which were realized on the basis ofInternational Harvester Scout but enriched with more refined and luxurious stylist solutions. However, the extraordinary Fissori creation, the 375/4 L was replaced in 1977 by the much more modest Sierra realized on the basis of Plymouth Volarè. These models found scarce success and they induced Monteverdi to stop the production of these types of vehicles, dedicating the production only to racing cars, in 1991 in the F1 championship.

Finally, Monteverdi can be described as a dynamic and very sensitive person, with sheer intuitions concerning the market conditions, a market, which at the time, required greater and greater investments in order to be in line with the norms in force, leading in that way the small owners to shut down.