It's still possible to be unique, smart and honest in this world. Being into imported automobiles makes that distinction a bit easier to achieve. Instead of shopping at Old Navy or Banana Republic, and pretending that somehow makes you cooler or hipper than the eight million people who walked out with shopping bags just before you did, there's the option of investing in something truly strange and wonderful, like a Lancia. If that happens, and you live somewhere in the New York metro area, you may have the opportunity to get acquainted with the sons of Domenico Spadaro.

Their story, and their late father's, covers a lot more ground and metal than just the brainpower-run-wild creations of Vincenzo Lancia and his successors. More than Italian cars, period, constitute the flow of its narrative. The Spadaro saga is classic in every way: Young guy from a little foreign town comes to America with skill and determination, earning the respect and affection of hundreds despite some rough personal edges and a considerable amount of time in America without the ability to communicate in fluent English.

So while nowadays, you can find any number of English and German specialty cars getting their drive on at Dominick European Cars in White Plains, New York, the Spadaro story is linked inextricably to offbeat Italian cars (and, to a lesser extent, motorcycles). It begins in 1920, when Domenico Spadaro was born in Roccalumera, a village at the northeastern tip of Sicily, near Taormina. As his son Santo explains the story:

"Dad had maybe a fifth-grade education. He wasn't really a student, shall we say. The schoolmaster in Roccalumera said, 'Maybe Domenico should find himself a trade,' because in Sicily in the 1920s, that was pretty much the standard order," Santo explained. "So my grandfather had picked for him to be a cabinetmaker, but that didn't last too long. Across the street in town was a garage. Dad didn't show up one day for work at the cabinet place. He was already at the garage, working for the owner as an apprentice."

       
Owners of Dominick European Cars, Frank (left) and Santo Spadaro.

Dad had maybe a fifth-grade education. He wasn't really a student, shall we say. The schoolmaster in Roccalumera said, 'Maybe Domenico should find himself a trade

After World War II ended, the elder Spadaro faced two realities: First, he had a lady friend who had just moved to America, analogous to the old Italian tradition of early immigrants sending for their loved ones back home to join them. And by 1953, Domenico had his own shop, enjoying the status of a capo meccanico, a chief mechanic, a title with added prestige when voiced in the home tongue. Domenico not only tamed cantankerous cars, but specialized in Italy's best: Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, and the real conveyance of choice for worthy Italians, the cars of Lancia. It's a world where engineering doesn't trump style, but instead coexists in perfect symmetry with it. That's been true since Lancia, the man, introduced his staggering Lambda with both independent front suspension and monocoque construction not long after Domenico's birth.

   
Domenico Spadaro was the principale of his troupe of Sicilian wrenches. In the shop he founded , parts are crammed everywhere.

"As far as the high-end cars went, he was a Lancia guy. There's a certain mechanical sophistication to them that really attracts the guys in the trade," Santo told us. "The way they're put together, they're all built to be taken apart like a Swiss watch. Every little sub-component can come apart. They're just built to a quality that turns guys like me, my brother and my father on. He enjoyed the status of principale in the Agro Valley in Sicily, because he always had about three or four mechanics and three or four very young kids who were apprenticed to him, and they would call him that whenever he went back."

   
Pretty good variety for an "Italian" car shop, what?The founder actually cut his teeth on a number of British imports once in the United States.

And so, by the end of the war, Domenico had become a callus-palmed artist, working with such cars as the Lancia Augusta, Europe's first entry-level sedan with both all-hydraulic brakes and monocoque construction. He got personal, too, with the Aprilia, perhaps the world's single most advanced car of the 1930s, and we're including both the Citroën Traction Avant and the Chrysler Airflow in making that assertion. It was the final creation of Vincenzo Lancia, a dramatically shaped little four-door sedan with a 1,352cc hemi-head V-4 for power, plus a Weissach-style integrated gearbox-differential unit and fully independent suspension.

   
With Lancla, a V-4 is dose to being a W-4, as this head demonstrates. Santo races this Ciulietta Sprint Veloce as a tribute to his dad.

Domenico was ready, profoundly skilled and deeply in love. He made his voyage past the Statue of Liberty and the leaping spires of Manhattan to join his bride, Tindara, with whom he'd be united the rest of his life. By 1948, the road to America no longer ran through the Lower East Side. He started out north of New York City in Westchester County, specifically the city of White Plains. Already by then, it was a stop along the commuter rail lines that ran north to the really monied towns such as Mount Kisco or Bedford Hills.

He found a tech position at a place called International Motors in White Plains. Santo told the story: "It was your classic Fifties import dealership with many makes under one roof. There was Fiat, there was Hillman, there was Renault, Simca, MG; they sold the whole smorgasbord of import cars. He worked there for about five or six years, then opened up his own place in 1961, about three doors down from where we're located right now, a few blocks away from the original International Motors."

That's just off Boston Post Road, which is what the local commercial section of U.S. 1 is called as it ambles down from Connecticut and across Westchester toward the Bronx. This is absolute car country, as much so as Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles or Gratiot Avenue in Detroit. Drive a little bit off Post Road and you're in Armonk, where IBM is based and a lot of very well-compensated people work. Pepsi, Hitachi and Heineken had their offices right near by. John Fitch had a dealership up the road selling European exotics. And we should add that White Plains was also home to Bill Kolb Ford, also on Boston Post Road, which in the 1960s sold more Shelbys than any other retailer in the United States.

Amid all this came Domenico, who reluctantly Anglicized his shop name to Dominick European Cars early on. Outwardly, he was still a mechanic, in the sense that he was buried up to his biceps in something strangely complex most days. But once he unzipped his coveralls, he commonly wore a tweed sport jacket, and came to include a beret as part of his daily wardrobe. Cigarette between his lips, Domenico came to resemble the embodiment of an artistic mentor in the Actors Studio or Juilliard definition.

"The famous story Dad used to tell me all the time was that when he worked at International Motors, there used to be an XK120 in there all the time," Santo remembered. "Dad didn't speak any English. The other mechanic who worked in the shop said, 'Dominick, this car's never run right. Can you see what you can do?' So he went through it, set the cam timing, adjusted the valves, the distributor, took it for a test drive. Delivered it to a very happy customer. The boss goes, 'You've seen these cars before? You've worked on them?' He said, the architecture was the same as any other twin-cam. My point is, Dad was more of a generalist, a guy who could work on British cars and German cars, not just cars from Italy."

As his sons, Santo and Frank, came of age, Domenico earned the rep as the guy not far from the five boroughs who could manage pretty much anything. He was the East Coast distributor for Lancia during the 1960s, fixed a lot of Maseratis, and kept a worn Ferrari 330 as a family car. The shop's customer base, which stretched well into the ridiculously rich beach towns of Connecticut, kept a steady stream of Austin-Healeys, Mercedes-Benzes and just about everything else imported coming in. If you had a creaky MG or a prized Stanguellini, Dominick's could handle it. The sons considered going in other directions: Santo has a finance degree, and Frank has one in mechanical engineering. But as Santo says, "I would take vacations from school and work at the shop. The shop was always in the background. The pull was too great."

The shop just handled a major mechanical and appearance upgrading of a Cisitalia 202 SMM, the letters standing for Spider Mille Miglia, or as it's better known, the Nuvolari Spider. The design of the tiny space-frame, aluminum-body sports car, supervised by Dante Giacosa of Fiat, dates to 1947. It's named for the Mantuan master, Tazio Nuvolari, who drove it in the 1948 Mille Miglia as if he were being chased by death itself. Despite having only 1,100cc worth of Fiat power, Nuvolari lashed it to second overall as the Cisitalia shook itself apart around him, his final great drive before a series of strokes leveled him. Perhaps 20 in all were built.

Even though he suffered a stroke himself in 1996, Domenico kept running his shop. When he finally passed on in 2009 at age 89, it was as if a head of state had died. An impromptu cortege of customer cars descended on the shop, makes from all corners of Europe. The turnout inspired the Domenico Spadaro Memorial Rally, perhaps the only such event held in honor of a phenomenally gifted mechanic. It's a highlight of the car season in the Westchester-southwestern Connecticut area.

"We have old-school customers that go back to the 1960s, to newer ones with very rare one-offs, to Spitfires, to Alfas, to Fiat 500s," Santo told us. "Plus the people with Lancias, the same sort of people who might buy Citroëns, say. I won't say Dad was a giant in this field, but he ran a good business and he was very serious about what he did. Nothing was taken lightly."

From Ferraris to Fiats, interesting cars can always be found parked at Dominick's curb.