My friend and the Fiat 500
Ten years ago a I spent a week in southern Italy with a group of friends. We rented a house outside a small village, ate lovely food and generally had a good time. When walking around the area we noticed this tiny super-cute dark green car sometimes parked near the harbour, it sure looked very Italian!
One night, on the way back to the house after a couple of drinks, the group stopped next to this car and my friend jokingly pretended it was her’s, posing next to it and when touching the door-handle… it came open, it wasn’t locked at all!
My friend, very surprised, quickly closed the door and everyone vacated the premises in a hurry. One doesn’t want to get in trouble with the locals for tampering with their property, no matter how cute it is!
That car was of course a Fiat 500—and this year, for her 40th birthday, we gave our friend the LEGO version #10271 Fiat 500 to relive the memories of our Italian adventure!
As I haven’t built this set myself I can’t give more of an opinion apart from that it looks really nice. My friend certainly enjoyed the build and sent some pictures.
If you want to know more about the original car, the Wikipedia entry for the Fiat 500 has some good information. Brickset has an excellent review of the LEGO set. This is the first set mentioned here on Hyggebygge that is not yet retired, so if you want to build your own the LEGO Fiat 500 is available (at the time of writing) from lego.com.
In popular culture
There’s one more thing… When the Studio Ghibli films were made available on Netflix this spring I got to see one of Hayao Miyazaki’s earlier films for the first time.
In the opening scenes of anime The Castle of Cagliostro, gentleman thief Arsène Lupin III makes a dramatic escape from a casino heist in his yellow Fiat 500! Throughout the film it’s featured in some really good chase scenes and although heavily beaten, the car is actually still around for the end credits!
The car in the film is of the very same model (F) and yellow color as the LEGO version so I found it surprising that none of the major LEGO blogs have made the connection. I guess not enough LEGO fans have seen the film, just like I hadn’t, but this is a good reason for more people to watch it! IMDB has images and a trailer if you want a sample.