Fiat 500 2008 Review

Leichhardt to Lygon Street

If I had a choice of cars to drive from Sydney to Melbourne, the Fiat 500 wouldn't be anywhere near the top of the list. In fact, it wouldn't even hover around the middle. I'd be looking for something big, reasonably powerful, with a comfortable ride, good seats and cruise control. Then the 860-odd kilometres down the Hume wouldn't seem so bad, even if this story would be so boring it might not stretch past the first paragraph.

Yet here I am, together with photographer Brunelli, perched in a pastel-coloured bump on the road amid luggage and camera gear like Noddy and Big Ears, pounding down lonely country roads where the only other traffic seems to be cattlemen in white Landcruiser utes. Yes, we left the Hume much earlier because we're not looking for ease or comfort. Hell, we wouldn't have climbed into the 500 if we were. We're out for a bit of adventure, to discover the roads less travelled and introduce the Cinquecento to areas far removed from Milan, or Paris, or wherever the fashion conscious would prefer to be seen in this type of car.

We're looking for a taste of Italy on the way, which is why we started the drive in Sydney's Leichhardt, and planned to end it in Melbourne's 'little Italy', Lygon Street. It's a nice pair of bookends to the trip: I'd never been to Norton Street in Leichhardt, but everyone says the Italians who had settled nearby decades before had made it their main shopping strip. Lygon Street is more of a known quantity because I'm from Melbourne, lived around the corner a long time ago and Carlton is synonymous with names like Silvagni, Borsari and La Porchetta.

The original Fiat 500, of course, is as Italian as pizza, gondolas and the leaning tower of Pisa. There are plenty still on the roads in Italy, and while it was sold in Australia from 1960 to 1971, it's now rare to see one in the wild. The new version arrived last year, and is unflinching in its use of styling cues from the 1957 original. The rounded shape, circular headlights, and chrome highlights are all there, while underneath are Panda mechanicals. It's the same retro trick pulled by Volkswagen and Mini, although the new 500 seems to have been accepted with less scepticism in Europe, where it's picked up a swag of awards, including that continent's Car of the Year gong. It's a car reeking of nostalgia and Italian style (even though it is built in Poland), yet from all reports has an honesty that makes it much more than just a curiosity.

It didn't go unnoticed in Leichhardt, probably because we parked it on the footpath and blocked the passage of younger ladies with prams and older ones with walking sticks. We set out to get a shot outside a typical Italian cafe, but found they were surprisingly rare on Norton Street, mainly because these days, shops seem to have been consolidated into the Italian Forum on lower Norton. And the council has eradicated decent parking opportunities anywhere else.

But then there were locals like Gina, from the nearby bambino-wear clothes shop who had owned many Fiats in the past, and Paul Messina and his mate Enzo who did a screaming U-turn in their Alfa 156 GTA to have a closer look. Was it a diesel, they wanted to know, and how much did it cost? Having driven it only a few hundred metres at that stage, I could still tell them that no, our baby Cinquecento was powered by a sluggish 1.4-litre petrol that reputedly produced 74 kilowatts and despite its compact size, couldn't manage a U-turn on Norton Street. Brunelli - who had checked it out at the Melbourne motor show - muttered that this version cost just under $28,000, which kind of shut everyone up.

The morning was slipping away; I'd had too many long blacks and the highway beckoned, as did the dunny out the back of Bar Italia. My geographical knowledge of Sydney is as crap as the jointed concrete roads that led us down Parramatta Road and out through Liverpool to the Hume Highway, which probably wasn't the quickest way south, but at least it was educational. The 500 might have a stunning interior for a car this size - ours had a white leather steering wheel and body-coloured dashboard trim - but the ride was firm to the point of being jarring, the clutch was soggy and the engine felt flat. It looked like being a long trip.

But we did have a plan, and the first instalment was to drive the 500 straight onto Italian soil. To do that, I'd made an appointment to visit the Italian Embassy in Canberra and meet ambassador Stefano Janfolla at 12:30pm. Unfortunately, I was going to be about two hours late; fortunately, precision planning is not a national trait in Italy where a shrug and a domani might mean tomorrow; might mean never. I remember learning once that 'procrastination' comes from the Latin cras (also meaning tomorrow) so even the Romans were not adverse to it.

Even so, by the time we arrived, the ambassador had moved onto slightly more important matters like, oh, something called a meeting of the UN security council, and we missed him. But the rest of the staff evacuated the building to have a look at the car. As Adriano Tedde (the recently appointed commercial attaché, newly arrived from Rome) pointed out, "Everyone from Italy has owned a Cinquecento or their family has. It's an icon, and we all remember being in one."

The same went for Pino Gumina, director of Canberra's Culturale Centro Italiano, which we also visited. While we inspected the auditorium and artworks including a bust of Italian poet Dante Alighieri (he gazes not at the fifth circle of hell, but wistfully at Manuka Oval). Pino told us of his old, black Cinquecento that had been his first car and cost the equivalent of about $170. "Does the driver's seat fold all the way back on this one?" he asked. No, I said. Why would you want it to? "For making love," he leered in his best Casanova accent. Apparently, a Fiat 500 with newspaper stuck to the windows was the Italian equivalent of a Sandman panel van. Without the double mattress, obviously.

I couldn't face the freeway, so we continued south to Cooma, heading for the Snowy Mountains which, after all, contain a massive hydro-electric scheme that was built in the 1950s largely by immigrant labourers, many Italian. After Adaminaby, a town drowned by Lake Eucumbene and resurrected a little farther away, we started climbing through the Kosciuszko National Park towards and past Cabramurra, Australia's highest town.

This is a fabulous road, and if I've sounded a little negative about the Fiat 500 so far, I'm happy to report it's a grippy little bugger, able to stick to the bitumen well within the limits of engine power and stability control system. But that's on a smooth road, unfortunately; in Australia we have bumps. And potholes, ripples and many other nasty things that quickly conspire to send the 500's torsion-beam rear end leaping alarmingly sideways mid corner. It was quite literally scary enough to have us looking for a broken damper, but I think that's how the European Car of the Year is actually meant to behave.

Darkness was descending, our intended overnight stop in Corryong over the Victoria border was still a long way away, and as we stopped on a desolate stretch of bushland road while Brunelli attached cameras to the car, I couldn't help thinking of Dante. "Midway through the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost," he wrote in Inferno. Maybe he was talking about the 500's headlights, which had so little penetration white posts were a hazard, let alone kangaroos.

Things looked much brighter the next morning as we rolled down the Murray Valley Highway towards a town called Bonegilla on the shores of Lake Hume. Here was a former staging post for (then) newly-arrived immigrants, most of whom were heading for the Snowy Mountains hydro scheme. A section of huts, reminiscent of a 1950s detention centre, still stand.

A quick stop in the beautiful town of Yackandandah to refill at the community owned petrol stop (the 500 averaged 7.2L/100km for the whole journey), and it was on towards the King Valley, a little east of Benalla. It's an area quickly building a reputation as a magnet for foody types, thanks to the abundant wineries, produce shops and country restaurants. And yes, Italian farmers played a large part in its development.

Take Fred Pizzini, whose eponymous winery was established by his father who emigrated from Trento, worked on the Snowy hydro, started a tobacco farm and then switched to grapes. Fred's a bit of a Fiat and Alfa fan, although at the moment he's got an Audi A4 and, intriguingly, asked if we wanted to see his Lamborghini out back. It turned out to be a skinny little 990 F-Plus tractor designed to fit between rows of vines - not a Murciélago - but still boasted the raging-bull badging nonetheless.

By late afternoon we were rolling into the outskirts of Melbourne, headed for Lygon Street. Lined with plane trees, it's full of people and buzzing with activity.

Brunelli and I head for Tiamo, which still has the best pasta on the strip and, you'd have to say after having Teagan and Louisa in the front seats of the Bambino, far from the ugliest wait-staff. We park the 500 wherever we like: in laneways, alongside Ferraris, virtually on the footpath and nobody seems to mind. As we've found everywhere else, everybody, but especially those with a little Italian in them, wants to climb into the tiny Fiat, marvel at its style and reminisce about its predecessor.

After two days and more than 1200km of driving, I'm about done, but there's one more stop. It's in the Melbourne suburb of Bundoora, where the Fiat Car Club of Victoria just happens to be having its monthly meeting. The members spill out of the Veneto Club to compare the new 500 with an original that has been brought along for the evening. I'm amazed at how small the original looks: the current 500 isn't bloated like, say, a Mini (it's shorter than a Mazda 2) yet looks huge next to the rear-engined, twin-cylinder car.

Owner Damon Earwaker, who works for a Melbourne Fiat dealer, uses it as daily transport and even shipped it to Europe last year, covering 6000km in four weeks. It's clearly no museum piece, so we went for a drive around the block with the little, but surprisingly torquey, twin cylinder chugging away behind us. At least it told me that the new 500 isn't such a bad long-distance cruiser after all.

I suppose the designers of the reborn 500 would argue it's still a city car, but it isn't particularly zippy and not exactly cheap. Not all the design features work: the headlights look cute but don't actually do anything, and the fixed-panel glass roof lets in so much heat, we resorted to stuffing it with newspaper. But is it Italian? Hell, yes. Nobody else could put so much emphasis on style over substance.

Images: Cristian Brunelli