Italy
1999 has been a busy year for Fiat. Its Punto supermini has been relaunched in an all-new but instantly recognisable format, which carries over the 1.2 8-valve and 16-valve engines. New to the range are a 1.9 diesel and the impressively fast 1.8 HGT hot hatchback which is capable of almost 130 mph. Also new to the range is the boldly-styled Multipla compact MPV, which makes use of a currently unique six-seat layout and is underpinned by the Bravo/Bravo hatchback chassis to ensure that it is good to drive. Both models have the ideal ingredients for sales success, but were not enough to prevent the Toyota Yaris from walking away with this year's honours at the European Car of the Year award ceremony.
Read more about this topic: 1999 In Motoring
Famous quotes containing the word italy:
“For us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery—back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!”
—Orson Welles (1915–84)
“the San Marco Library,
Whence turbulent Italy should draw
Delight in Art whose end is peace,
In logic and in natural law
By sucking at the dugs of Greece.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)