I’ve often said that the Italians are good at food, fashion and football. Football meaning soccer of course. They do manage to win a World Cup from time to time, and normally put on a pretty good show.

But I guess now we have to add Fiat. While a lot of people used to joke that the name stands for “Fix It Again, Tony” the company has actually made quite a turnaround. While it looks like Fiat is coming to the rescue of Chrysler, the Turin-based automaker is not actually putting any money down. Now that’s the way to buy a company.

While I have long been a fan of one of the other lines under the big Fiat tent, Alfa Romeo, Fiat itself has never really done it for me. I guess that’s because I owned a Fiat Uno for a while. It was fine for tooling around the city, but you weren’t going to get anywhere too fast.

But Fiat does make good “fun” cars. We took the Fiat 500 out for a ride as the Chrysler deal was being made. It’s not a bad little car. Take a look at the video.

And if you think that’s fun, the old 500, which looks almost just like a VW Beetle that’s been shrunk, is an absolute blast.