Torino, Italy

Launched in the late 1950s, Fiat 500 (in Italian, Cinquecento) conquered millions of people and it also reached America.

The F model is part of The Chicago Athenaeum’s Good Design® permanent collection.

The Nuova 500 of 1957, that little curvy babe that only a few people have been able to refuse.

The car (that started off as a flop) is a rear-engined, four-seat, small city car that was manufactured and marketed by Fiat Automobiles from 1957 to 1975 over a single generation in two-door saloon and two-door station wagon bodystyles.

Launched as the Nuova (new) 500 in July 1957, as a successor to the 500 “Topolino,” it was an inexpensive and practical small car. Measuring 2.97 metres (9 feet 9 inches) long, and originally powered by a 479 cc two-cylinder, air-cooled engine, the 500 was 24.5 centimetres (9.6 inches) smaller than Fiat’s 600, launched two years earlier, and is considered one of the first purpose-designed city cars.

The designer in charge of the project is Dante Giacosa, who already designed the Topolino and the Nuova Balilla, and will later design the Campagnola, the Bianchina, the 127 and the 126. 

“To design is also to evaluate the difficulties, identify the essential problems, search for the different possible solutions and select those that could solve them in the simplest and most accurate way,” said Giacosa.

It is the perfect city car, a sinuous car that looks like it came out of a Walt Disney comic book (the nickname, however, stems from its small size) but which is starting to show the signs of passing time. Italy needs to be motorized, it’s just recovered from the war and is enjoying the economic boom. In Italy, there’s an army of workers with three main characteristics: they are urban, they have a certain amount of money, and a lot of free time to spend. 

The price, however, was high: 490,000 lire, which was a year’s salary for the majority of Italians at the time. With just one hundred thousand lire more, in fact, you could buy a 600, the other icon of the Italian economic boom, which came out in ’55, has four seats and two luggage compartments.

The 500 features a 479 cc (500cc nominal) two-cylinder engine, hence the name, producing just 13 horsepower. This model also features a fabric roof, foldable to the rear of the vehicle, like that of a Citroën 2CV — rather than the later roof design, which only folds halfway back along the roof. The Nuova 500 is one of three models featuring “suicide doors.”

In mid-1958 Fiat introduced the Nuova 500 Sport, featuring a more powerful engine and a two-tone livery, white with a red stripe along the flanks. Unique to the Sport was an all-metal rigid roof with three longitudinal grooves. A short-open-roof model was added a year later, in 1959.

Replacing the original Nuova in 1960, the D looks very similar to the Nuova, but there are two key differences. One is the engine size (the D features an uprated 499 cc engine producing 17 bhp standard—this engine is used right through until the end of the L in 1973) and the other is the roof: the standard D roof does not fold back as far as the roof on the Nuova, though it was also available as the “Transformable” with the same roof as the Nuova. The D also features “suicide doors”.

In New Zealand, where it was locally assembled by Torino Motors, the 500 D was sold as the “Fiat Bambina” (Italian for “baby”), a name that is still in use there to describe this car

The real “boom” for the Fiat came in the 1960s and more precisely to 1965. Miniskirts are everywhere, and the minicar is stealing the heart of Italians.

The Fiat F version was still the best-selling model of all, and it also ends up as “Good Design” in The Chicago Athenaeum’s permanent collection.

The real turning point, however, is the use of plastic instead of metal (in 1963, and Giulio Natta receives the Nobel Prize for his Moplen)

For the Fiat 500 L, the seats then become four. Now the car is looked at with interest, and starts to work its way up. It also gets reinterpreted, becoming longer and with a greater load capacity (Giardiniera) and it even reaches “America” (that’s what Italians called the United States at the time), with two oversized headlights that give it a froglike appearance.

For Americans, it’s a really unusual vehicle: when walking past it, it is impossible not to turn around and look at it.

The 500 Giardiniera (500 K on some markets) estate version of the Fiat 500 is the longest-running model. The engine is laid under the floor of the boot to create a flat loading surface. The roof on this model also stretches all the way to the rear, not stopping above the driver and front passenger as it does in other models of the same period.

The Giardiniera also features “suicide doors” and was the only model to continue to use this door type into the 1970s. In 1966 production was transferred to Desio where the Giardiniera was built by Fiat subsidiary Autobianchi under their marque from 1968 to 1977.

A total of 327,000 Giardinieras were produced, and from 1968 sold only as Autobianchi Giardiniera.

The global auto industry’s special versions of this iconic car are  countless: many manufacturers, designers and body shops have reinterpreted the Fiat 500 myth, like Ghia, Frua, Vignale, Abarth and Pininfarina. 

Among the most curious models, we have the Moretti 500 Coupé, an extra-long prototype designed for Americans who are always looking for more space, the Motocarrello, a draisine for railway use and the Gamine by Vignale and Fiat 500 Zanzara that totally revolutionized the car. For beach lovers, there were the Spiaggina models, cars perfect for having fun like the Jolly by Ghia, which only had a canopy for protection, or the more extreme Lucertola, with six wheels and off-road skills. It’s impossible not to mention the Bianchina by Autobianchi, which was born as a luxury version of the 500 (the design was always by Giacosa) and later became Fantozzi’s car.

But it is above all the cinema that has used the 500 as a mirror of joys and sorrows, of misery and nobility. So, here it is in Steno’s The Overtaxed, in François Truffaut’s Day For Night and, above all, in Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, in which it is omnipresent. The cult scene, however, is in Ettore Scola’s We All Loved Each Other So Much, when Vittorio Gassman parks it in Piazza del Popolo in Rome.

The story of the Nuova ended in 1972 with the latest version, the R, which stayed on the market until 1975. 

The numbers are those of a legend: in 17 years, 3.9 million New 500 Fiat cars were built. And they become 4.2 million if you add those of the licensees abroad, especially the Steyr-Daimler-Puch in Austria and the Fiat Neckar in Germany.