The epic of Italian style and enterprise does not live only through the centenary history of the great car manufacturers, but also in shorter stories, passed like meteors, sometimes leaving only slight traces. With these assumptions, the National Automobile Museum of Turin (Mauto) presents the temporary exhibition “LMX Sirex, an Italian Dream of the Sixties”, inaugurated on 13 September and open to visitors until 20 November. The LMX Sirex was born in 1968 in Milan on the initiative of the entrepreneur Giovanni Mandelli and the engineer Michel Liprandi, who reworked a project by Gioachino Colombo.
The exhibition, curated by Raffaello Porro, features five specimens from the collection of Renato Montalbano. Together with his son Giorgio, he patiently reconstructed the events of the few dozen cars produced, managing to buy some of them, including the five on display, four coupes and one spider plus a chassis and body. They are the most interesting and best preserved. In addition to the particular technique, they are characterized by the design of the fiberglass bodywork by Franco Scaglione, in which all Italian suggestions and American inspirations live. A bit Corvette, with touches (and some parts) of De Tomaso and Alfa Romeo mixed with wisdom and skill.
Alongside the cars, images and rare vintage documents of the short epic of this brand, under whose name the stories of companies such as the Eurostyle of Turin, founded by Ivo Barison, who took care of the assembly of the first models, and the Samas of Alba, who finished the last chassis until 1973. All clips collected and narrated in a forthcoming book edited by Montalbano himself, with the same determination that led him to put together the fragments of an all-Italian and not completely forgotten story.
