TOURING SUPERLEGGERA

Long before the motor industry became dominated by common platforms and automated production lines, buying an important car could involve two distinct decisions: choosing who would engineer the chassis, and deciding who should create the body around it.

Carrozzeria Touring was one of the great names of that era.

Established in Milan in 1926 by Felice Bianchi Anderloni, Touring became closely associated with some of the most celebrated European motor cars of the twentieth century. Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Maserati, Aston Martin and Lamborghini are among the manufacturers whose histories contain designs carrying the Touring name.

The Aston Martin DB4, Maserati 3500 GT, Ferrari 166 MM Barchetta and Lamborghini 350 GT illustrate the remarkable breadth of its influence. Touring's patented Superleggera construction method — lightweight body panels supported by a fine tubular framework — also gave the company an engineering identity alongside its reputation for design.

Nearly a century later, Touring Superleggera continues to operate as a coachbuilder. The tools and materials have changed considerably, but the underlying idea remains surprisingly familiar: take exceptional mechanical foundations and create something individual around them.

Drawing a new body

Coachbuilding occupies an unusual position between automotive design and manufacturing.

A successful project has to work visually, but it must also function as a complete motor car. Proportion, aerodynamics, cooling, structural requirements, lighting and packaging all place constraints around the designer's original sketch.

Touring Superleggera undertakes that process from concept through engineering and physical construction, producing limited-series cars in extremely small numbers.

Recent projects demonstrate how differently the same philosophy can be interpreted.

The Disco Volante, created around the Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione, revisited the extraordinary 1952 Alfa Romeo C52 while developing an entirely new shape around contemporary mechanical architecture. It was followed by the Disco Volante Spyder, while subsequent projects including the Sciàdipersia, Aero 3 and Arese RH95 explored very different interpretations of the coachbuilt grand tourer and sports car.

The Veloce12 provides a more recent example. A naturally aspirated 5.5-litre V12 remains at its centre, but the transformation includes carbon-fibre bodywork, chassis reinforcement, adaptive suspension, revised braking, improved cooling and extensive interior work.

These cars are not exercises in changing body panels alone.

The mechanical package, dynamic behaviour and interior have to develop alongside the exterior design if the finished result is to feel like a complete automobile rather than a donor car wearing different clothes.

Returning to its own history

Touring Superleggera also finds itself in the unusual position of restoring cars that its predecessors originally designed and constructed.

That creates a particularly interesting relationship with the past.

The Maserati 3500 GT is one example. Originally introduced in 1957 with Touring's Superleggera aluminium coachwork, it became one of the defining Italian grand tourers of its period.

Touring has more recently completed the restoration of a 1959 example formerly owned for 27 years by Horace Elgin Dodge III. The project involved complete assessment and disassembly, body alignment and panel work, mechanical rebuilding, restoration of the interior, trial assembly, paint and final testing, with specialist Italian partners contributing to areas of the work. The completed car was subsequently certified by Maserati Classiche.

There is something particularly appropriate about returning such a car to the company responsible for its original shape.

Restoring lightweight aluminium coachwork demands an understanding of how those bodies were constructed, but historical correctness reaches further than the metal itself. Materials, instrumentation, trim and mechanical specification all contribute to whether the completed car accurately reflects what once left the workshop.

In this respect, Touring's classic work and its contemporary coachbuilding activities are closely connected. One requires an understanding of how things were done; the other asks how the principles behind them can remain relevant.

A tradition that still moves forward

The survival of specialist coachbuilding is remarkable in itself.

Modern cars are extraordinarily complex objects. Electronic architecture, safety systems, advanced structures and tightly integrated mechanical components make creating a new body around an existing platform considerably more challenging than it was during coachbuilding's golden age.

Yet the desire for individuality has not disappeared.

Touring Superleggera's modern work demonstrates that coachbuilding can still exist without becoming an imitation of the past. Carbon fibre may take the place of aluminium in certain applications, digital engineering now accompanies hand craftsmanship and contemporary performance demands are far removed from those of the 1950s.

It is about proportion, elegance and creating a motor car in numbers small enough for individuality to remain meaningful.

At the same time, Touring's restoration work provides a direct connection to the cars upon which that reputation was originally built. Few companies can place a newly coachbuilt V12 grand tourer alongside a Maserati designed by the same name more than sixty years earlier and legitimately regard both as part of the same continuing discipline.

That continuity between historic coachbuilding, restoration and the creation of contemporary limited-series motor cars is what makes Touring Superleggera a HACCA Trusted Specialist.

Touring Superleggera
Milan, Italy
+39 02 9390 9285

Few names illustrate the changing role of the coachbuilder quite like Zagato.

Founded in Milan by Ugo Zagato in 1919, the company emerged from an idea shaped by his earlier experience in aeronautics: sports cars could be made lighter, more aerodynamic and more purposeful by applying principles familiar to aircraft construction. That philosophy produced an unmistakable approach to coachbuilding and began relationships with manufacturers that would span generations.

Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, Lancia, Ferrari, Maserati, Lamborghini, Bentley and numerous others have subsequently carried Zagato coachwork. Some collaborations became particularly enduring — the relationship with Alfa Romeo, for example, began in 1921 and has continued for more than a century.

Today the company remains family-controlled and independent, with the Zagato Atelier near Milan continuing to design and produce extremely limited-series and one-off motor cars.

The interesting part is how much the method has changed while the purpose has not.

Form following purpose

Zagato has rarely approached automotive design as decoration.

The company's earliest bodies were influenced by competition, where reduced weight and improved aerodynamics had practical consequences. That functional thinking gradually produced many of the details now associated with the Zagato name.

Across different decades the interpretation has changed considerably, but there remains a willingness to alter proportions, reduce unnecessary visual weight and create shapes that are often more distinctive than conventionally beautiful.

It is one reason a Zagato-bodied car is frequently identifiable without seeing the badge.

Modern commissions translate that thinking into a very different manufacturing environment. CAD and virtual-reality development now sit alongside carbon fibre and contemporary production methods, while traditional body-making knowledge remains part of the Atelier's capability.

Recent cars demonstrate just how broadly that formula can be interpreted.

The one-off Alfa Romeo Giulia SWB Zagato continued a relationship stretching back to the Tipo G1 of 1921. The AGTZ Twin Tail, meanwhile, took inspiration from Alpine's A220 competition car and created a removable long-tail section, allowing the same car to adopt two distinct configurations.

In 2025 the Alfa Romeo 8C DoppiaCoda Zagato explored another idea entirely, combining two historically significant tail treatments within a single one-off design.

The subjects change, but the underlying process remains recognisably coachbuilding: start with engineering, understand the purpose and then create a body with an identity of its own.

Recreating what disappeared

Zagato's relationship with its past extends beyond celebrating surviving cars.

Through its Classic activities and Sanction II programme, the Atelier has undertaken the unusual task of reconstructing Zagato designs that no longer exist.

Old photographs can be analysed photometrically before the shape is recreated through CAD modelling and CNC processes. Aluminium panels are then hand formed to reproduce bodies whose original physical reference may have disappeared decades earlier.

It is a fascinating intersection between old and new methods.

Traditional coachbuilding alone cannot provide dimensions that no longer exist. Digital technology can recover and model the shape, but ultimately the body still has to become a physical object with the surfaces, proportions and construction expected of a Zagato.

The Porsche Carrera 356 B 1600 GTL Zagato Sanction Lost is representative of this work — effectively allowing a lost chapter of coachbuilding history to exist again.

This is rather different from conventional restoration. Instead of preserving a surviving object, the task is to reconstruct enough historical evidence to recreate something absent.

For a company with more than a century of designs behind it, that archive has become an increasingly important part of the Atelier itself.

Still drawing the next car

The temptation for a company with Zagato's history would be to live comfortably within it.

Instead, contemporary projects continue to move the name into unfamiliar territory.

The capricorn 01 Zagato, revealed in 2025, is the first hypercar to carry a Zagato-designed body. Engineered and built by Capricorn in Germany, it combines a carbon-fibre monocoque, supercharged V8, manual transmission and a production run limited to 19 coupés — the number referencing Zagato's founding year of 1919.

Alongside automotive work, Zagato also operates as a wider design studio, with projects extending historically into trains, industrial machinery and alternative mobility.

That breadth helps explain why Zagato remains relevant.

Its heritage includes some of the great coachbuilt cars of the twentieth century, but the company has never been solely a custodian of those designs. Each generation has had to interpret what a Zagato should be using the engineering, materials and opportunities available at the time.

More than a century after Ugo Zagato began applying aeronautical thinking to motor cars, the Atelier is still doing fundamentally the same thing: using design and coachbuilding to give exceptional machinery an identity that could not have come from anywhere else.

It is this continuing relationship between historic coachbuilding and contemporary automotive design that makes Zagato a HACCA Trusted Specialist.

Zagato
Milan, Italy
+39 02 934 6621