Pietro Frua

Pietro Frua (May 2, 1913 - June 28, 1983) was one of the leading Italian coachbuilders and car designers during the 1950s and 1960s. He was the fourth son of the tailor Angela and the Fiat worker Carlo Frua in Turin, the metropolis of coachbuilding in northern Italy. After school he was educated as a draftsman at the Scuola Fiat. His professional career began at the age of 17, when he joined Stabilimenti Farina as a draftsman. At the age of 22, he became director of styling at Farina, already a leading Turin coachbuilder who employed several hundred people at that time. Here Frua had the first contact with his pupil and lifelong friend Giovanni Michelotti, who became his successor as head of the styling department when Frua started his own studio in 1937.

But during the Second World War car styling work was scarce and Frua had to design children?s cars, electric ovens and kitchen units, as well as a monocoque scooter which later should become the Vespa. In 1944 Frua planed for post-war times, bought a bombed-out factory, hired 15 workers (including Sergio Coggiola, who founded his own carrozzeria in 1966) and equipped himself to design and build cars. His first known car is a Fiat 1100 A Sport Barchetta from 1946. The Maserati company was one of the first clients who contracted Frua for automobile styling of their new 2-litre 6-cylinder sport car A6G. From 1950 to 1957 Frua built 19 Spiders and 7 Coupés in three different design series (including those on the A6 GCS racing chassis).

In 1957 Frua sold his small coachbuilding company to the Carrozzeria Ghia in Turin. As a countermove to this he was Ghia director Luigi Segre made him head of Ghia design. In this short period Frua was responsible for the successful Renault Floride, which had a well-deserved commercial success. Strangely this success led to a disagreement between Segre and Frua over the paternity and Frua left Ghia to start again with his design studio on his own. At the same time, Pelle Petterson designed his Volvo P1800 at Ghia under the attentive eye of Frua, and it is not surprising, that it is often attributed to his pen. From 1957 to 1959 Frua also designed several cars for Ghia Aigle, the former Swiss subsidiary of Ghia Turin, which already was independent at that time. Giovanni Michelotti was his predecessor in this function.

After Ghia Aigle finished coachbuilding a former employee Adriano Guglielmetti started his own business and founded Carrosserie Italsuisse in Geneva. Pietro Frua did again the drawings and most probably built all the prototypes for this company. After a Corvair-like styled pontoon-Beetle in 1960, Italsuisse showed a Maserati 3500 GTI Coupé in 1961 on the Italsuisse stand at the Motor Show in Geneva together with two tasteful bodies on Studebaker chassis. 1964 followed a lovely little spider with Opel Kadett mechanics.

During the sixties Pietro Frua was amongst the most prominent car designers in Italy. The ?Frua line? was a synonym of the good taste of a single man, who follows its practical realization up to the last detail of the fully functional one-offs and prototypes which he often drove on their own wheels to their presentation at the motor shows in Europe. 1963 in the age of fifty at the peak of his career, Frua designed for Germany?s smallest car maker the Glas GT Coupé and Cabriolet. 6.631 were built until 1968 (1.255 as BMW GT after BMW had bought Glas). In the same year Maserati showed the Frua-bodied Mistral and the four-doored Quattroporte, which after several one-offs re-established Frua´s connection to this manufacturer. With these cars Maserati flowered into a new market for taste- and powerful understatement cars. In 1965 AC showed the Frua-bodied 7-litre 428 hp supercar AC 428 Spider, which drew a lot from the Mistral?s shape. A Coupé followed in 1967. In the same year Monteverdi in Switzerland started to build a Frua-bodied sport coupe with the same Chrysler machine.

At the end of the sixties Frua tried in vain to prolong his success with Glas by making a dozen proposals to BMW. BMW decided to make it on their own, but Frua´s influence can be recognized in the ?angry view? of the BMW´s until today. In 1967 the Swiss racing driver and Ferrari importer Peter Monteverdi started to build his own sport cars with the Frua-bodied Monteverdi 375 S. Due to Frua´s limited capacities the production of the following models went to Fissore in Turin.

In the seventies Frua reduced the frequency of his presentations, but in the sixth decade of his life he still was able to demonstrate his good taste and craftsmanship to the younger one?s who already had taken their role in the industrial process. There was no longer a demand to build completely detailed and functional prototypes in less than ten weeks and no more customers for special bodied one-offs.

In 1982, Pietro Frua contracted cancer and had an unsuccessful surgery in the autumn of that year. He and his long-time assistant Gina married shortly before he died on June 28, 1983, a few weeks after his 70th birthday.

More information at [[1]]