With the Wall Street crash and the subsequent closure of Isotta Fraschini Automobili, Castagna lost both its most lucrative market and the chassis that it loved to adorn.
It was the first sign of the changing times and the customer’s interests likewise shifted towards a new type of car.

During the years before the war, Castagna produced vehicles on Fiat 2800 and Lancia Astura chassis for Pope Pius XI, for the House of Savoy and for other powerful figures of the period.
The concept of “fuoriserie” custom building was applied to cheaper chassis and mechanics. The upshot was vehicles with unchanged appeal no longer suitable only for officialdom but also for leisure purposes.

Ercole’s three sons, all of whom had recently joined the company having attended the prestigious Swiss college in Neuchâtel, helped steer the business through these changing times. Each was assigned a different task based on his particular skills: Carlo looked after the commercial side of things and would later be nominated company director, while Cipriano and Savinio oversaw production and administration respectively.

Unfortunately, Milan was no longer the motoring city it had once been, and of the trailblazers of the automobile industry only Alfa Romeo and Bianchi remained, while Isotta Fraschini did its best to reopen its doors.

Since the custom-built car was by now a symbol of a distant past, a company like Castagna no longer had a raison d’être. Having survived the bombings of 1942, the “dream factory”, which “donates elegance to speed”, as the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio had once said, could not keep abreast of the times and succumbed in 1954.

Years later, the cinema borrowed the surviving exemplars. Billy Wilder chose the splendid Coupé de Ville on an Isotta Fraschini chassis as a symbol of the epoch for Sunset Boulevard, while the brilliant ivory of the Torpedo Sport 8 A SS represented the apprehensions of James Dean in Giant.
Tradition is continuity, a bridge in time linking past and present.