Fissore

Fissore is a family firm from Savigliano, a small town south of Turin. Four brothers – Bernardo, Antonio, Giovanni and Costanzo – took over a wheelwright’s shop around 1920 and at first built horse-drawn carts before turning to car bodies. Bernardo, the eldest, led the workshop from the 1930s towards special bodies: hearses, postal vehicles, small buses and above all advertising vehicles. The breakthrough came in 1953 with a coupé on the Fiat 1100 TV to a design by Mario Revelli de Beaumont.

In the 1950s and 1960s the firm grew to around two hundred employees; almost everything was made in house, from the bumpers to the interior trim. Fissore built bodies for De Tomaso, Osca and Auto Union, worked for Vemag in Brazil and from 1969 built the bodies of the Swiss Monteverdi. Mario Fissore ran the engineering side and became president in 1971; Bernardo died in 1973.

When Monteverdi gave up in 1984 that was the end for Fissore too, and the company went into liquidation. The name lived on in Rayton Fissore, founded in 1976, which later built the Magnum off-roader.

On the underpinnings of the Fiat 500 Fissore built exactly two cars: the Aruanda of 1965 and the Mongho 650 of 1969. Both remained one-offs, and both have survived. The original leaflet for the Mongho 650 is shown under Documentation.