NORTH SMITHFIELD -- Rod Burdick’s youthful affair with a beautiful Italian temptress was love at first sight, a case of Romeo and Giulia.

Now 70, he has been reunited with his love for seven years and there is little chance they will again be parted.

“It started when I was 26 years old and I bought a 1961 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider,” he said.

A year or two later, he traded it for a 1963 Giulia Spider, which had a bigger engine. However, with a family on the way, he then traded the Spider for a 1963 Giulia Sprint coupe.

Then he fell in love with the Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint Speciale.

“I saw the SS coming down the road and almost wrecked my automobile,” he said. “It was the first new car I ever bought — a 1966 Giulia SS.”

But, after a couple of years, the pressures of raising a family forced him to sell the limited edition special body two-door coupe and settle for more sedate transportation.

Fast forward to the 1990s, and with his three daughters “grown up and gone away” and with his bills paid up, he started looking for a Giulia SS, “my love all my life.”

Finally in late 2000, Burdick located a 1965 Giulia SS in Boulder, Colo., through a fellow Alfista, as Alfa Romeo enthusiasts are known. “He said, ‘There’s a guy out here who has one and he hasn’t put it up for sale, but I know he wants to sell it,’ ” Burdick said. “I told him, ‘Put me in touch.’ ”

After talking to a number of people who knew the car, he said he bought it sight unseen.

“It was a 50-footer,” he said, explaining that it looked good from 50 feet, “but closer than 50 feet it didn’t look so good.”

While the engine was in good shape, the body needed work and a paint job. Plus he had about half the chrome stripped and treated, gutted the inside “headliner to rugs,” and restored the controls, which “had been totally ignored.” He also spent many hours polishing out scratches in the window glass.

Overall, he spent two years restoring the car, which is now in immaculate condition. In August, it won the Directors’ Award at the “Tutto Italiano” Day at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum, in Brookline, Mass.

Why does Burdick love his 1965 Giulia SS so much? “Just look at the lines,” he, said marveling at the aerodynamic styling of the more powerful version of the 1957 Giulietta Sprint Speciale. The body work, with its long, low rounded lines —“compound curves all over the place” — and long tail, is by Bertone.

“It’s a car that does not look like anything else on the road,” he said.

He also cited Alfa Romeo’s all-aluminum engine, which produces 129 horsepower from a 96 cubic inches of displacement. The 4-cylinder in-line engine has hemispheric combustion chambers, centrally located plugs and two valves per cylinder directly controlled by dual overhead camshafts. It has a 5-speed gearbox and front disc brakes.

“[It has] one of the highest, if not the highest, horsepower to cubic inch [ratios],” he said. “One-point-three horsepower per cubic inch.”

Burdick said he uses the car as a weekend driver and has put about 20,000 miles on the clock since it came out of restoration about five years ago.

“It was meant to drive, absolutely,” he said, adding that he does not like to leave it parked anywhere.

He also owns a 1963 Alfa Romeo Spider convertible and said he does most of the mechanical work on the cars, which he learned when he could not afford a mechanic.

Alfa Romeo was one of the first manufacturers to arm everyday cars with powerful engines — the Giulietta line (1954 to 1965) with 1300 cc engines and the Giulia line (1962 to1978) with 1600 cc engines. Burdick said the Giulietta and Giulia names were an allusion to Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet.

Body styles ranged from Sprint coupes, Spider convertibles (made famous by Dustin Hoffman in the 1967 film The Graduate), Berlina sedans, and limited edition, special body Sprint Speciale (SS) coupes.

The sedans tended to have a boxy design, but were still surprisingly aerodynamic. The Giulia Turismo Internazionale (TI) “went like stink,” according to Burdick, despite being “a box with a box on top of it.” And one of the most successful Alfas from the 1960s was the Giulia Super, a square-shaped rocket famously used by the Italian police.

Burdick, who worked in industrial sales for Sun Oil Co. (now Sunoco) most of his working life, initially drove English sports cars, which he said were a lot of fun.

“But the English cars are very stiff and hard riding and seemed to be made of bits and pieces of other things,” he said. “But with the Alfa Romeos, it was the complete package, way beyond their counterparts in terms of technological development. Plus the design.”

Despite its reputation for producing cars with exceptional flair, Alfa Romeo has had a mixed history. It was founded in Milan by an Italian aristocrat in 1910 and got its name from the acronym for Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili (Lombard Automobile Factory), or A.L.F.A. In 1916, it was taken over by Nicola Romeo, who renamed the company Alfa Romeo.

During the 1920s, Alfa Romeo produced successful race cars — one of its drivers being a young Enzo Ferrari — as well as touring cars. However, it was rescued by the government in 1928, after Romeo left and First World War defense contracts dried up. During the Second World War, it relied on government contracts, as well as building vehicles for the wealthy.

Following the war, Alfa Romeo was again independent, and gained success on the racing circuits, winning the first Formula One championship, in 1950, and the first Sports Car Club of America Trans-Am championship, in 1966. Success on the track translated into commercial success with the Giulietta and Giulia lines of small but powerful and stylish everyday cars.

However, in the 1970s, the government again bailed out Alfa Romeo, and it was taken over by the Fiat Group in 1986.

Alfa Romeo stopped exporting cars to the United States in 1995, but will resume next year, with the $80,000 8C Competizione sports car. Other current models include the 147 family sedan, the GT coupe, the Brera coupe and the Spider, which is a roadster version of the Brera, but there are no plans to bring them to the United States as of now.

The company’s Milanese origins are reflected in its badge, which combines the seal of the city of Milan (the Crusaders’ red cross on white) on the left side with the seal of the Visconti family (a serpent eating a man or baby) on the right side. (The Viscontis ruled the Duchy of Milan for centuries.) In 1925, following its success on the race track, the company added a wreath of laurel leaves to the rim of the badge.

Burdick said Alfa owners, or Alfisti, joke that the badge, with its green snake looking somewhat like a dollar sign, translates as: “Jesus Christ, these repair bills are eating me alive!”

But then again, what price true love?

pelsworth@projo.com