Fuoriserie Lancias illustrated history of a culture 1925-1985.

Buying a chassis from a car manufacturer and asking a coachbuilder to construct a body after an individual design was normal practise during the early years of motoring. For Lancia too, although the arrival of his revolutionary Lambda with body and chassis built as an integrated unit restricted freedom to create something different or exclusive. From 1925 onwards Lancia produced a range of no less than 26.000 bodyless chassis for the next 30 years, to be clothed by individual coachbuilders with exclusive one-off bodywork or produced in very limited numbers – hence the Italian expression fuoriserie – or custom-built.

The booming and very creative Italian coachbuilding industry was located for a large part in and around Turin, where Fiat focussed on mass-production. Exclusive coachbuilding for Lancia evolved as a unique culture of high levels of creativity and craftmanship, so much appreciated then by individual customers as well as today’s connoisseurs and collectors. All this was the fruit of visionary entrepreneurs like Battista ‘pinin’ Farina and his elder brother Giovanni, Giacinto Ghia, Ercole Castagna, Giovanni Bertone, Vittorino Viotti, Alfredo Vignale, Felice Bianchi Anderloni from Carrozzeria Touring, and several others. They developed coachbuilding in close cooperation with some of the most talented bodywork stylists of the thirties and early postwar years – count Mario Revelli di Beaumont, Giovanni Michelotti and Carlo Felice Boano. Their legacy is huge with several thousand items built, in addition to 49,525 exclusive special-bodied Lancias which were built by external coachbuilders between 1955 and the early seventies.

Lancia authority Wim Oude Weernink made a selection of as many different examples of the Lancia coachbuilt culture as possible, resulting in the 650 image-count for this book – the vast majority original period images. A must-have for the connoisseurs of the creative Italian coachbuilding industry.

Engels, hardcover, 2023, 226 pagina’s, 650 illustraties, Wim Oude Weernink.