Silver Series 4: The Alfa Romeo Spider's Unglamorous Final Act
The Alfa Romeo Spider ran for twenty-eight years across four distinct series, which is long enough to accumulate both a devoted following and a complicated critical record. The Series 4, produced from 1990 to 1993, was the final version and has historically been the least celebrated — a product of Alfa Romeo’s difficult late-Fiat-ownership period, fitted with revised front and rear styling that divided opinion at launch and has not entirely reconciled it since. The silver example photographed on a Sicilian coastal road, the Ionian Sea visible in the background, is a Series 4, identifiable immediately by those distinctive multi-hole alloy wheels that became the car’s most-discussed visual element.
The wheels are correct and period-specific. They are not universally loved. The Series 4’s revised nose and squared-off tail, departing from the cleaner lines of the earlier cars, drew criticism when new from observers who felt that Alfa Romeo had complicated a shape that did not require complicating. That criticism has softened somewhat in the intervening decades as the Series 4 has acquired the patina of age and scarcity — fewer were built than any of the preceding series, and the good ones are increasingly difficult to find.
What remained consistent across all four series was the fundamental proposition: an open two-seat Italian sports car on a platform derived from the Giulia, powered by Alfa’s twin-cam four-cylinder, sized and priced to put Italian roadster driving within reach of buyers who could not afford a Ferrari or chose not to spend Ferrari money. The Series 4 kept that proposition intact while adding fuel injection, a catalytic converter, and revised suspension calibration. It was a more modern car than its predecessors. Whether it was a better-looking one remains a matter of position.
In the photograph, an Audi crossover occupies the background — a bystander at a layby, generic and functional, representing everything the Alfa Spider never tried to be. The contrast is not subtle, but it is useful. The Spider, even in its most debated iteration, is doing something the Audi is not: it is making an argument about what a car should feel like to be in. The Series 4 makes that argument in silver, with the sea behind it, and the argument holds.