1939 Alfa Romeo 6C2500 Sport Berlinetta by Touring. Photos by Tom Wood, courtesy RM Auctions.
Wearing an aluminum berlinetta body crafted by Carrozzeria Touring of Milan, the 1939 Alfa Romeo 6C2500 carrying chassis number 915.033 has proven itself a show winner at places like Villa d’Este and Salon Prive. Its stately appearance hides a dark past, however, one that links the car to an Axis power leader and his beloved mistress. Once sold for $300 through the pages of Hemmings Motor News, the Alfa Romeo is now a featured lot at RM’s upcoming Paris sale.
Completed in 1939, the Alfa received a factory or dealer upgrade to Super Sport specifications, which added a trio of Weber carburetors to the car’s 2.4-liter, double overhead-camshaft, inline six-cylinder engine, boosting output from 95 horsepower to 110 horsepower. Combined with a lightweight Superleggera aluminum body and four-wheel independent suspension, the 6C2500 would have been an impressive performer in its day. Though details such as chassis number have been lost to history, one such Alfa Romeo was acquired by Italian Fascist Party leader Benito Mussolini, who gifted the car to longtime mistress Claretta Petacci.
History notes that Claretta Petacci and her brother, Marcello, were attempting to flee Italy in such a car in April of 1945, when their German-led convoy was stopped by Italian partisans. Claretta and her lover were captured and later executed, while the Alfa Romeo was seized by Italian authorities and sent to Livorno. There, the car fell into the hands of U.S. Army Air Corps Major Charles Pettit, who used the Alfa as his daily driver while stationed at Camp Darby in Italy. When his tour ended in 1949, Pettit shipped the car home to his family’s farm in upstate New York.
Pettit is said to have enjoyed the car on rural backroads for several years, at least until the engine snapped a connecting rod. Lacking the ability to repair the damage, Pettit simply pushed the car into a barn, where it would remain until a relative, Albert Harris, purchased the Alfa in 1967. A pre-restoration teardown commenced, but the work was never completed, and in 1970, the car was offered for sale in the pages of Hemmings Motor News.
Enter Ron Keno, a Mohawk, New York, high school teacher who dealt in antiques as a sideline. A student of Keno’s brought the car to his attention, and a deal was struck over the telephone to purchase the semi-disassembled car for the sum of $300. With the car came a story from Harris, identifying the Alfa as the very car that had once belonged to Mussolini’s mistress.
Intrigued, Keno began to research the tale, which led him to historian Richard Collier. Collier, in turn, referred Keno to Franz Spögler, a former German army officer who’d once served as Claretta Petacci’s chauffeur and bodyguard. Spögler remembered the Alfa well, though there was little that could be done to positively identify the car over the telephone or via written correspondence. In November of 1975, Spögler visited Keno in New York, and immediately recognized the Alfa as the car he’d driven Petacci in decades earlier. Proof came in the form of a German army tool roll, given to Spögler by a soldier encountered during a roadside repair; remarkably, the canvas and leather tool roll had remained with the car throughout its history on both sides of the Atlantic.
Circa 1979, Keno sold the partially restored car to collector Donnie Morton. Morton, in turn, sold the car to the Imperial Palace auto collection in Las Vegas, and there a cosmetic restoration was finally carried out before the car was put on display. In 1999, the Alfa once again changed hands, this time going to an owner determined to properly restore its mechanicals so that the car could be used in vintage rally competition.
The engine was sent to Italy for rebuilding, using parts supplied by Alfa Romeo authority Francesco Bonfanti. Once back together, the car was entered in the 2001 and 2002 running of the Mille Miglia Storica, before its owner agreed to fund a no-expenses-spared restoration with Garage Bonfanti. The work, which went so far as to recreate replicas of the original dashboard switchgear, reportedly took two years and cost a staggering €500,000 (roughly $625,000 in 2004).
Since its restoration (during which Francesco Bonfanti estimated that roughly 90 percent of the car’s bodywork is original), chassis 915.033 has gone on to earn a class win at the 2007 Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este and a Best of Show at the 2011 Salon Prive. As offered in Paris, the Alfa will include the correspondence between Keno, Collier and Spögler documenting the car’s history, and will also include the tool roll used to identify the car (courtesy of Ron Keno). Its past aside, as one of just 16 Alfa Romeo 6C2500s fitted by Touring with a berlinetta bodystyle, the car is both rare and desirable, and RM predicts a selling price between €1.9 – €2.4 million ($2.15 – $2.7 million) when the car crosses the block in Paris on February 4.
For additional details, visit RMAuctions.com.
UPDATE (5.January): The 1939 Alfa Romeo 6C2500 achieved a high bid of €1.8 million ($2.1 million), but failed to meet its reserve price.
