Cars
Broken Dreams: Alfa Romeo Nuvola. A Cloud of Regrets
Walter de Silva recalls the Alfa Romeo Nuvola, a 1996 concept blending heritage and innovation, that never reached production despite huge potential.
"Out of every ten projects you do, only one makes it to production..." says Walter de Silva, with the se-renity of those who know the value of his own talent, when we ask him why that magnificent Concept called Nuvola (Cloud) never came onto the market “it’s a shame, before the arrival of the 146 and the 147, Alfa needed a halo model, the Nuvola had everything Alfa needed to put it fairly and squarely back on the map”.
De Silva, then head of the Centro Stile Alfa Romeo, who subsequently moved on to Audi with considera-ble success, recalls how the car - it was 1996 - arrived at a time of radical changes at the helm of Fiat with Paolo Cantarella, a great fan of sports cars, becoming CEO and who had wanted it at the Paris Motor Show. The harmony of the lines that elegantly bring many of the features of some of Alfa’s most famous pre-wars models into a modern era, generated a considerable number of purchase requests and even Luca di Montezemolo, then President of Ferrari, was interested in the car fearing it could become a rival of his latest creation, the F355.
