The Fiat 124 Spider has spent most of its existence in the shadow of cars that were more expensive, more powerful, or more famous, and has spent the last two decades quietly becoming one of the more sensible investments in the Italian classic market. Rally number 26, a sage green Series 2 example photographed on the same Sicilian road as the Giulietta Spider that preceded it by a few car lengths, represents the argument for taking the 124 seriously on its own terms.

There is a point at which a car stops being a classic and becomes a document. The two-tone cream and black open tourer photographed somewhere on the Sicilian rally route — wire wheels, fold-flat windscreen, running boards, coachbuilt bodywork in that particular interwar combination of cream upper panels over black fenders — has crossed that threshold. It belongs to the late 1920s, almost certainly to an Italian manufacturer given the event context, and the most likely candidates are a Lancia Lambda or a Fiat 521 or 522. The Lambda, produced between 1922 and 1931, would make it the older and more significant of the possibilities; the Fiat 521 series, which ran from 1928 to 1931, was the more common car.