10 Cool Used Italian Cars For Under £10,000

Ah, Italian cars. As anyone that’s ever owned one can attest, they can be a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. Cars that combine unmatched beauty and excitement with a consistent nagging fear that they might suddenly grind to a halt could only come from the country that gave us The Last Supper then accidentally cut a door into the bottom of it a couple of hundred years later.

Still, if you are willing to take the plunge and enjoy the highs of owning a zesty Italian car on the days when everything’s working properly, there are plenty of excellent options out there for not that much money. Here are our 10 favourite Italian cars you can find used for under £10,000.

Fiat Coupe

Don’t be fooled by the Pininfarina badge on the dash: they only did the interior. The crease-covered outside of the Fiat Coupe was actually styled by Chris Bangle, before he went on to overhaul/ruin (delete depending on how you feel) BMW design.

Still, we reckon the Coupe might be his best work, and the car underneath it isn’t bad either. Despite its front-wheel drive layout, it was a proper little sports car, especially in 220bhp, 2.0-litre five-cylinder turbo guise. Although prices are rising, tidy examples with this motor are still well within budget.

Alfa Romeo 159 Sportwagon

Though the Brera coupe and Spider, erm, spider of the 2000s were dynamic disappointments, their shortcomings were a lot more forgivable in the Alfa 159 saloon and Sportwagon with which they shared many of their components.

It’s the estate that takes our vote, partly because it’s a bit more handsome to our eyes, and partly because, well, estates are cool. Plenty of engines are available, from diesels to a meaty 3.2-litre V6 with four-wheel drive, but our advice is to be patient and track down one of the later cars with the 1.8-litre ‘1750 TBi’ turbo motor.

Alfa Romeo GTV/Spider

If the idea of an Alfa Spider does appeal, you’re probably better served tracking down one of the late ’90s versions, or its GTV coupe counterpart. While again, they were front-wheel drive only, they were sweeter to drive than their layout suggested, and were topped off by gorgeously wedgy Pininfarina-styled bodies.

With the exception of some very late cars that gained a new inline-four, all came with a choice of two of Alfa’s greatest engines – the Twin Spark four-pot or the Busso V6. Choose the former for sweeter handling and fewer potential headaches, and the latter for speed, drama and that utterly gorgeous soundtrack.

Abarth 500/595

2007’s reborn Fiat 500 was such a runaway success that it lived on for some 17 years. That’s all well and good, but this is Car Throttle, so the one we’re interested in wears a different badge: Abarth.

Fiat’s in-house tuning brand was revived for the hot version, which was never quite as sharp as, say, a Renaultsport Twingo. It made up for that, though, with coochie-coo looks and a hilariously rorty 1.4-litre turbo four-pot. There’s a huge range available for this budget, from early cars with 133bhp to later, gruntier 595s, so fill your boots.

Lancia Beta Spider

Lancia’s ’90s exit from the UK, and the growing classic status of many of its cars, means that this storied brands’ machines aren’t as easy to find on the cheap in Britain as they are in mainland Europe (and no, we’re definitely not going to recommend any of the 2010s one that came here as Chryslers).

The Beta, though, while dwindling in numbers, can still be found for four figures. Our favourite is the Spider, a 2+2 targa topped convertible styled by Pininfarina and built by Zagato in a strange collision of two of the great carrozzerie. This one will take more patience than some others on the list, both to buy and run, but it’ll be worth it when you’re motoring along with the top off and that throaty twin-cam singing away on a summer’s day.

Fiat Panda 100HP

Underestimate the Fiat Panda 100HP and its 99bhp 1.4-litre four-pot at your peril. With just 975kg to shift around, this boxy little terrier of a car was one of the last of the breed of ultra-cheap, ultra-light, ultra-simple hot hatches.

The brilliance of cars like this is that you can use pretty much all the power, all the time, and combined with the Panda’s diminutive size and fizzy engine, it serves as a reminder of the essence we’re missing in big, heavy modern cars. Italy’s always done small, simple cars as well as it’s done hugely expensive, powerful supercars, and the 100HP is proof.

Fiat Panda 4x4

If you like the sound of a Panda, but you’d rather get to lots of places eventually rather than some places quickly, the 4x4 version is the car for you. There’ve been all-paw versions of all three generations of Panda, but we’re thinking of the ultra-boxy original. Its four-wheel drive system was supplied by Steyr-Puch, the same company that built the Mercedes G-Wagen.

Combine that with low weight and rugged simplicity, and it’s no wonder these things can still be found to this day working their little socks off across rural Italy. They’re much scarcer in the UK, but can still be comfortably found within budget.

Maserati Quattroporte V

Ah yes. Here’s the entry on this list that comes with the biggest disclaimer. Yes, you can spend well under £10,000 on a Maserati Quattroporte V, but once you have, you’d better hope you have a whole lot more left over as a contingency.

Still, we can’t not include this on the list. Here was a massive saloon car, yet one that had a front-mid-mounted V8 very closely related to the one in the Ferrari F430 and its gearbox out over the back in a transaxle layout for beautifully balanced handling. It’s just so impossibly cool that you simply won’t care when you’re inevitably pulled over in a cloud of smoke at the side of the A34.

Alfa Romeo Giulietta Cloverleaf/QV

Alfa’s 2010s crack at a hot hatch was never as rounded as a Golf GTI, as sharp as a Renaultsport Megane or as in-yer-face as a Focus ST or Astra VXR, but it has something none of those rivals could really possess: style.

It was pretty quick, too. Earlier cars, badged simply as Cloverleaf, got a 235bhp 1.8-litre turbo four with a manual gearbox, while later cars swapped that for a TCT dual-clutch auto. Find a Launch Edition version of the latter, with its two-tone colour scheme and chunky teledials, and you might not have the most complete hot hatch around, but you’ll definitely have one of the best-looking.

Fiat Barchetta

Such was the Fiat group’s obsession in the 1990s and 2000s, Fiat’s pretty little rival to the Mazda MX-5 was front-wheel drive. The thing is, in a lightweight, relatively low-powered car, that doesn’t really matter as long as the engineers have done their homework. Okay, it wasn’t as satisfying as that pesky Mazda when you really pushed it, but for something based on a Punto, it was pretty convincing.

It was also a heck of a lot more stylish, especially on the inside, even if you had to contend with a steering wheel on the wrong side in the UK – the Barchetta was never built in right-hand drive. Far cheaper than the MX-5 when new, its comparative rarity means it’s now much pricier second-hand, but still well in budget.