By now, we've probably all heard the famous quip that tells us "every car enthusiast should own at least one Alfa Romeo", and most likely, our minds wander to thoughts of the exotic pre-war 8C, or maybe the rough-and-ready Giulia GTAm or the iconic, open-topped Duetto and Graduate spyders. But particularly in the post-war period, Alfa Romeo made their bread and butter by selling mass-produced _berlinas _(that's a much more pleasing way to say "sedan") built on a unibody platform and powered by the family of twin-cam engines.

Prior to WWII, Alfa was building high-end sporting cars and competition cars, often with coachbuilt bodies and complex supercharged engines. In the post-war recovery period, the old designs were dusted off and polished up with new bodies, but the 6C2500 was a very expensive car to build and few buyers were able to afford such an exclusive automobile. Alfa Romeo needed a car they could produce in much larger numbers, and they achieved that with the unitary-construction 1900\\. While certainly a much more efficient car to produce, the 1900 was still comfortably a mid-market car, available in a variety of expensive coachbuilt variations, and what Alfa Romeo needed was more volume.