Nearly 40 years, ago 12-year-old Fabrizio Sama boarded a bus in the quaint town of Malcesine, on the eastern shore of Lake Garda in the Veneto Region of Italy. The bus would carry Sama and his brother 60 kilometers south to the Verona train station, where they would board a train and complete the journey to their grandparents’ house for the summer holiday.
Then, as now, Malcesine was a popular tourist destination, so the bus to Verona was packed like an overstuffed calzone. Young Fabrizio was thus very fortunate to not only get a seat, but to get one next to a window. Though he didn’t know it at the time, this bit of good luck would profoundly change his life.
“The window [view] let me discover an unexpected and most remarkable car that was behind a row of regular used cars for sale at a small used-car dealer,” he recalls. “This was in the middle of the 1980s, and where we were, there were not very many magazines or TV shows with cars. For me, it was like ‘What is that?’
“It was so much ‘more’ compared with the British cars my dad had,” Sama continues. “I was particularly impressed by the seats and the chrome and the proportions of the body. It was like the equivalent of a futuristic UFO from the 1950s, suddenly discovered in an old Roman city in Italy. It was just crazy!”
In the ensuing years, when making this annual trip to spend the summer holiday with his grandparents, Sama saw the same car in the same place. “My hope always was to get the red light so the bus would stop in front of the dealer, and I could get a longer look at this mysterious car. After a few years of this I got the idea to write down the telephone number from the dealer’s window, and once at home give them a call.”
The secretary who answered the phone revealed to Sama that the object of his affection was a Corvette with a V-8 engine. And while it was not for sale, Sama describes learning the car’s true origins and appellation as “the first important part of the puzzle.”
“At the time it was a prohibited dream to own a car like this,” he says. “The most I could hope for was maybe to get a Vespa scooter from my parents. But knowing the name and model of the car was for me like touching the sky, and I was able to start collecting magazines with pictures of fantastic Corvettes.”
In 1997, after owning a few cars, including a Jeep and a sporty Volvo, Sama was finally ready to chase his childhood dream. He began by contacting a man in Milano who advertised American car parts for sale in various magazines. With his counsel, and the information gathered from reading several books, Sama significantly augmented his knowledge of vintage Corvettes, even learning how to determine if a car’s components are “correct.”
Naturally his first target was the very car he used to see when traveling to visit his grandparents, but unfortunately that one had been sold and was not available. With assistance from his father, Sama looked at five or six other cars before finding exactly what he wanted: a 1960 Corvette that was just like the one he used to see from the bus window. It happened to have a very early serial number, and was assembled in October of 1959 during only the second or third week of production.
This car was initially sold in the United States, but at an unknown point in the distant past someone imported it into the United Kingdom, where it stayed for several years. Following its tenure in the UK, the car
was transported to Italy by Count Vittorio Zanon di Valgiurata, the president of the Automotoclub Storico Italy (or “Historic Automobile Club if Italy”). This gentleman was a well-known patron of Formula One and sports-car racing, and a noted collector with a diverse array of unusual cars. The ’60 Corvette spent many years in his extensive collection, which was housed in Torino.
Following Count Zanon di Valgiurata’s death, the same American-car-parts vendor Sama had befriended when he was educating himself about vintage Corvettes acquired the car and put it up for sale. After verifying that it had a straight and rust-free chassis, an undamaged body, and most of its original components—including its 270-horsepower, dual-quad 283 engine; four-speed transmission; and Positraction differential—Sama reached an agreement with the seller.
“It was love at first view,” he recalls, “and after agreeing to a trade I acquired the car…in the heart of Torino and drove it home to Lake Garda.”
Sama continued to educate himself about Corvettes in the years after acquiring the ’60. In 2002, while attending a car meet in Treviso, an ancient city on the outskirts of Venice in northeastern Italy, he was fortunate to meet Boyan Brkic, an American Corvette enthusiast. “Boyan was very kind to help me with knowledge, introduce me to the NCRS, and involve me with car activities in Southern California.”
Sama appreciated the intense focus NCRS put on restoring vintage Corvettes to “as new” condition. Thus inspired, he has taken steps to replace any parts on his C1 that were not entirely authentic, including installing a correct Al Knoch soft top and reproduction top-tank aluminum radiator. Shortly after buying the car, he also replaced the existing tires with bias-ply 6.70×15 Firestone wide whitewalls.
Unfortunately those tires, as well as several subsequent sets, lasted only a few years before visible cracks appeared in the whitewalls. To address this, Sama eventually bought a set of Avon rubber. Though these tires were not originally offered on the ’60 Corvette, their size and construction are consistent with that of the original equipment. More importantly, they have held up much better than the Firestones, Sama tells us, and they offer noticeably improved grip as well.
In addition to general maintenance, Sama has, over the years, rebuilt the engine’s dual-carburetor setup; installed of an original-style, paper-cartridge oil-filter canister; freshened up the four-speed transmission; and restored the Positraction rear end. He’s also spent a considerable amount of time going through the car’s electrical components to make sure the wiring is sound, and all the contact points in the switches and elsewhere are clean and secure.
Though he has always focused on maintaining the car’s original components, and replacing items that didn’t meet that standard, Sama’s goal has never been to create a showpiece. Instead, his first priority has always been to maximize his enjoyment of the driving experience, and for him an essential part of that is keeping the entire process authentic. This includes preserving all the shortcomings inherent to a 70-plus-year-old automobile, right down to the slippery bias-ply tires, lock-prone drum brakes, finicky dual-quad carburetion, failure-prone electronics, and so on.
“For me,” he explains, “this car was just a dream when I was a child—something so unique that it almost seemed like it was from another planet. The first time I drove [it] the emotional impact was incredible. Now even today, more than 25 years later, the same exact feeling is always still there.”
As often happens with Corvette ownership, Sama has found that the culture and lifestyle surrounding the car have their benefits as well.
“I have met many people and made some very good friends around the world as a result of this car,” he says, “and I’ve driven it on trips and road rallies as far as several hundred kilometers away, into the Alps and Austria, among other places. The car has never broken down or had a failure on the road.
“It has been a fantastic way to experience and enjoy all of the feelings of the time period it is from, when life and culture reemerged and flourished after World War II ended. And still, after more than 25 years, any time I know I will drive this C1, it makes my stomach move. All of the fantastic emotions of the first day I drove it are still there.”
