In 1962, a young draftsman working inside Bertone’s studio in Turin sketched an open-top interpretation of a car that did not yet exist. Giorgetto Giugiaro was barely into his twenties. The shape he drew, a removable roof panel braced by a slender structural arch rather than a folding top, was filed away when the fledgling company that would use it, Bizzarrini, collapsed into bankruptcy in 1969. More than sixty years later, that drawing has finally become a real automobile. The new Bizzarrini 5300 Aperta Lusso is not, in the strict sense, a revival or a continuation car. It is something rarer: a factory finishing a design it never had the chance to build the first time around.
Bizzarrini will hand-build ten examples of the Aperta Lusso, each commissioned individually, with deliveries beginning in 2027 and pricing set per client rather than published. The body is a single-piece carbon-fiber composite structure on a semi-monocoque bonded chassis, reinforced through the transmission tunnel with aerospace-grade steel to recover the torsional rigidity an open roof would otherwise cost it. Power comes from a 5.3-liter front-mid V8 producing more than 400 horsepower, paired with a five-speed Tremec manual and capable of better than 175 mph. The cabin is finished to the standard of a coachbuilt commission rather than an options list: leather and Zegna fabric trim, an instrument panel cut from a single piece of European maple, a gear knob inlaid with Italian tortoiseshell. The first car, named La Dolce Vita, was finished in a bespoke pale blue named for its commissioning owner’s daughter, the kind of detail that signals a genuine bespoke order rather than a limited-edition marketing run.
The timing is not incidental. The announcement lands in mid-2026, months ahead of the concours season, when bespoke coachbuilders traditionally introduce commissioned work to the collectors most likely to order one. Publicizing a single client car, La Dolce Vita, rather than a price list or an order form, is itself a signal: Bizzarrini is selling access to a commissioning relationship, not a catalog option, and the remaining nine slots will likely move through word of mouth among existing clients before they ever reach a public waiting list.
That distinction is worth sitting with. Continuation cars, Aston Martin’s DB4 GT and Jaguar’s XKSS chief among them, recreate vehicles that were already built, raced, and documented, simply resuming a production run decades after the fact with modern materials and safety. The Aperta Lusso has no built ancestor to recreate. It completes a design that existed only as an unrealized concept, the product of a genuine collaboration between two of the most consequential figures in postwar Italian car design. That gives it a different kind of authenticity, not the authenticity of matching numbers, but the authenticity of documented, decades-old intent.
Giotto Bizzarrini’s own history explains why that intent carries weight. He left Ferrari in the engineering exodus of 1961, having led technical work behind the 250 GTO during his years developing Ferrari’s 250 series, and founded his own firm in Livorno in 1964. Company records point to roughly 133 examples of the 5300 GT built across its Strada, America and Corsa variants before Bizzarrini folded in 1969, and the Corsa edition won its class outright at the 1965 running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, reportedly recording the race’s fastest speed down the Mulsanne Straight. Bizzarrini also engineered the chassis underpinning the Iso Grifo A3/L, a car whose standing in the collector market has only strengthened as buyers rediscover his engineering.
The current Bizzarrini company, reconstituted in 2020 under Pegasus Brands and backed by Alroumi Group Holdings, has already shown it can execute rather than simply announce. Between 2022 and 2024, it built and delivered 24 examples of the 5300 GT Corsa Revival, a continuation edition of the original Le Mans class winner, picking up a Best Continuation Car citation from Robb Report along the way. That track record matters to anyone evaluating the Aperta Lusso as more than a rendering. This is a company with a completed, delivered production run behind it, not a startup promising its first car.
None of that guarantees the Aperta Lusso becomes a meaningful collector car in its own right. Ten examples, each built to a different specification, is a difficult population from which to establish comparables, and a marque revived on outside capital carries a different kind of risk than an unbroken original manufacturer. Serious buyers should watch documentation above all: whether Bizzarrini preserves and makes available the archival Giugiaro drawings tying each car to its 1962 origin, whether build records are kept to the standard original 5300 GTs are now valued against, and whether the Aperta Lusso becomes a genuine bridge to the forthcoming Giotto Hyper GT rather than a standalone curiosity. It sits within a broader trend of modern engineering meeting classic design, though few such attempts start from an actual, dated design document rather than a stylist’s fresh interpretation.
Original 5300 GT Strada and Corsa examples now trade among the most respected names in postwar Italian competition cars, not because Bizzarrini built many of them, but because what he built was engineered without compromise. As this publication has argued elsewhere, the real fight in today’s market is rarely about the nameplate on the decklid, it is provenance versus craftsmanship. The Aperta Lusso stakes its entire claim on the latter. Collectors rarely pay a premium for a big engine or a beautiful shape alone; they pay for a documented moment in history, and the Aperta Lusso’s moment happened in 1962, on a drafting table in Turin, sixty-four years before anyone actually got to drive it.
Shawn Henry