A 177-year-old Italian coachbuilding house wants to take a hacksaw to the Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio and turn it into a two-seat, soft-top sports car. The catch? Castagna Milano needs to find an owner willing to hand over their sedan for surgery.
The Milan-based firm, originally founded in 1849 as a builder of horse-drawn carriages for European aristocracy, has published renderings of a dramatically reworked Giulia QV that moves the cockpit 330 mm rearward toward the rear axle. That shift creates a longer hood, changes the weight distribution, and gives the car proportions that look nothing like the four-door it started as.
Every exterior panel would be fabricated in carbon fiber. The rear doors are gone entirely. Castagna Milano estimates the stripped, reskinned body could bring curb weight down to around 1,420 kg, a serious reduction from the standard Giulia QV’s roughly 1,700 kg.
The front fascia borrows some visual language from modern Peugeots, particularly the claw-shaped LED daytime running lights, though a triangular grille nods to Alfa Romeo’s own design DNA. Out back, thin LED taillights sit above stacked exhaust tips carried over from the Quadrifoglio, flanking a carbon fiber diffuser.
Then there’s the folding soft top. Castagna Milano hasn’t addressed how it plans to maintain structural rigidity once the roof comes off, which is the kind of detail that separates a beautiful rendering from a drivable car. Chopping the top off a unibody sedan without extensive chassis reinforcement invites all sorts of cowl shake and flex that would undermine the Giulia’s sharp dynamics.
The project remains purely theoretical for now. Castagna Milano, which was revived in the early 2000s after the original company closed in 1954, has previously built bespoke versions of Fiats and Peugeots. Nothing quite this ambitious, though.
What makes the idea tantalizing is the hardware underneath. The Giulia Quadrifoglio’s twin-turbocharged 2.9-liter V6, derived from Ferrari architecture, remains one of the finest engines in any sport sedan on sale. Wrapped in a lighter, shorter body with two fewer doors and open-air motoring, it could become something genuinely special.
Alfa Romeo itself has no announced plans to build a Giulia coupe or convertible. The brand’s future product strategy under Stellantis has leaned heavily toward electrification, and the Giulia’s own successor remains uncertain. The Cuorerosso concept hinted at a more emotional direction, but nothing production-bound has materialized.
That vacuum is exactly where coachbuilders thrive. When a manufacturer won’t build the car enthusiasts want, someone else steps in with a sketchpad and a willingness to cut metal.
Whether Castagna Milano actually finds a Giulia QV owner ready to sacrifice their sedan is another question. These cars aren’t exactly littering used lots, and the ones that exist tend to be held tightly by people who love driving them as-is. Convincing someone to let a small Italian shop dismantle and rebuild their daily driver requires either tremendous faith or a second car in the garage.
Castagna Milano says it is actively looking for that client.
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