Combine Italian styling, Swiss precision, and American muscle, and you have something close to the perfect grand touring car, some might say. There were several performance gran turismo cars around in the late 1960s, some from Italian stables such as Iso and Maserati, others from Germany and England. Then there was the High Speed 375 from Swiss company Monteverdi of Binningen, Basel, run by Peter Monteverdi (b. 1934). Their first full production road car (specials and MBM single-seat racers aside) was a Frua-styled effort that was every bit as good as it looked. The Monteverdi was first presented at Germany’s Franfurt show in 1967, following a formula that had worked for the likes of Iso, Jensen, Gordon-Keeble, and Facel-Vega – take an American engine, drop it into a tubular frame chassis (square-tubed in this case) and then wrap a beautiful European body around it.
