If you need, go to the Japanese article

Cinquecentos in general have various door mirrors simply because side mirrors were (allegedly) not required around the time Cinques came out in Italy in the 1950s. So, they put on whatever available or their favorite stuff, today. However, it seems that most of their efforts have failed and the mirrors seen on the Cinques look neither functional nor aesthetical.

The former owner’s choice was even worse: black, bullet-shaped and too small– ugly and dangerous. I had replaced them with chrome-plated ones, and looked OK but still too small.

I thought it’s a good idea to install a pair of “present” Fiat 500’s door mirrors and tried, but in vain… They were too large (despite that the present one is relatively small compared with other ordinary cars).

Finally, after weeks of search throughout the web, I came across the door mirrors for the early Mazda Miata, whose rounded shape fits that of the Cinque, and bought a pair on the web auction. The original color was rather dull, so I painted them in red!

The angle of the door surface where the mirror was attached was too close to vertical. I had to make a wedge-shaped spacer to correct the angle of the mirror.  The spacer’s surface must be curved so as to fit the door’s curvature. The old Miata’s mirrors are not motorized and small enough to fit the micro Cinque, and their oval shapes go so well with round shape of my car.

Here they are:

It was a good fine day today, so that I slipped in my Fiat 500 to get to the mountain house.

Just about reaching the mountain pass, it started to snow. I was worried about the tires, which were not for snowed or frozen road.

When I arrived, it looked the weather had recovered, but soon the situation started to get even worse. Then I decided to do stuff only for a few hours or so to be able to get back home before sunset.

I was sort of hurry to work, and made a major bummer– stepped on an old nail, which pierced the shoe sole and stuck in the thenar of my left foot so deep. It’s swollen and still aching even now…

Oh, well… I quit the day’s work much earlier, for it seemed a bad idea to continue in the miserable now with an aching foot. I thought I could have got more injury; the work of the day was mainly with a circular saw, which is very dangerous.

On the way back, the thermometer at the pass indicated “-1″(degree, Celsius= below freezing point).  There wasn’t much snow and the road surface wasn’t frozen yet, but if I went there after dark… uhhh… I don’t even wanna think…