The radio I love most is
Alfa Romeo C6's Aster, built in the '40s,
whose mask, frame, buttons
and electronic parts I have made just like the original,
to please the people who love this car.
My name's Carini Lino.
I love electronics and especially car radios.
It started when I was a child, at the electronics institute,
and went on until I joined the army, when I was around 19 years old.
Then I left it aside for financial reasons.
I needed to do something useful.
Unfortunately...
I couldn't take it up until much later.
Now, I'm among my treasures,
the ones I build, modify, repair.
And over the years, I've collected many car radios,
and they help me satisfy some of my clients--
actually, they're more like friends rather than clients--
and I use them to test my radios,
because I retrieve some pieces to assemble a radio on a car
that was abandoned 40 years ago in a barn, for instance.
Maybe they've had some parts removed by kids or someone else,
so they have missing pieces.
And as I collect them,
I can restore and apply them to the radio
so that it looks like the original.
Here we have an antenna
of an Auto Vox that was assembled
in Lancia or luxury cars in the '50s,
that the driver could position up or down using a handle
similar to the one used for the windows.
It was placed on the front fender, on the left,
and the driver, from inside, could put it up to listen to AM radio,
because it had been developed for medium frequency.
As an amateur collector,
I have collected them even if they didn't have real monetary value.
Because a real enthusiast is not attracted by worth;
an enthusiast is in love with that specific thing,
not with its monetary value, but with what it represents.
With its flaws along with its qualities.
Otherwise, he's not a real collector. He's a businessman. Nothing more.
A real enthusiast cares about the details
of how the item was originally.
I try to keep the originality as much as possible.
At least as much as I can.
You lose a lot when you try to restore.
It requires a lot of work
to give it originality.
You can spend many nights working.
It's more difficult than useful.