It has been a while since we did a Rare Car piece, I've got a couple lined up to do, but when I found this I knew I'd have to post it up as soon as I could.

Triumph made some very nice British touring sports cars in their post war years, some elegant design, but none of them seemed to have the flair of the Italians, who were at one of their peaks for designing beautiful cars.  Enter stage left Salvatore Ruffino, managing director of a company distributing Triumphs in Italy, not content with the standard Triumph styling he believed that more well heeled Italians would pay for a prettier car and commissioned Vignale to build a two seater coupe.  Vignale engaged Giovanni Michelotti to design the car and then set about producing the prototypes.

The prototype was recieved very well at the 1958 Turin motor show and went into production with Vignale in 1959, with some slight alterations to the front ends lighting arrangement.  Production however is too strong a word for what this car went into, with the bodies being hand formed it meant that these would always be a low volume car.  Ruffino's original plan was to produce a thousand vehicles; this is the number of chassis' he had agreed with Standard-Triumph that they would supply.  Sadly this wasn't how things panned out, when British Leyland took over Triumph in 1961 they decided to concentrate on the forthcoming TR4, indeed they engaged Michellotti to pen the car and it bears a number of similarities to the Italia.

With the withdrawal of support from Triumph Ruffino went it alone and financed Vignale to continue to produce cars, but eventually stopped in 1962.  Over that time period 329 cars had been produced, all bar six were left hand drive.

Technically the Triumph Italia is a TR3A underneath, 1991 straight 4, overhead valve, 4 speed manual with overdrive, rear wheel drive, disc front brakes and drums at the rear.  The very last few Italias had the TR3B's improved gearbox.  Really this car is all about its beautiful styling though.

If you fancy picking one up Fine Cars of Switzerland have one for £70,000 ...

A much more detailed write up of the Triumph Italia can be found here, well worth your time reading.

Photos from this Flickr Set