In the spring of 2012, Mazda and Alfa Romeo announced their plans at a partnership with a rear-wheel-drive roadster that was to be based off of Mazda’s MX-5. Earlier this year, claims that Alfa Romeo was backing out of this partnership began to spring up; these reports claimed that, in the project, Alfa would be replaced by one of its sister companies, specifically Fiat or Fiat-Abarth. Those that assumed the latter were correct.

Harald Wester has confirmed that the new Alfa Romeo Spider is to be unrelated to this aforementioned project with Mazda. Fiat-Abarth will produce the Miata-based roadster. The Alfa Romeo, on the other hand, will be part of project Giorgio, which is a series of nine AWD and RWD Alfas to be released in the next few years. This is great news, as there will be two new Italian roadsters coming into the market.

There is more good news to this announcement (unfortunately, the Spider will not be a Dacia Sandero-based roadster); there has been talk recently—especially with the news of the upcoming Ferrari IPO—that, as CEO, Sergio Marchionne will ruin the top-tier marques under the wing of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. It seems as though Marchionne has retained his stance that Alfas are to be produced only on Italian soil, which could be seen as a move to maintain the integrity of the brand; however, this is questionable seeing as Alfa Romeo is to produce an SUV in the upcoming years. One can hope that, if not with Alfa Romeo, Marchionne will at least maintain the image of Ferrari by not increasing the yearly production drastically in the near future.

It is definitely an interesting move to release two similar models from both Fiat-Abarth and Alfa Romeo, which might mean that one of the two—presumably the Alfa—is to be priced higher than the other. Even if this is not true, this announcement reveals that we may start to see more small Italian roadsters on the road in the near future.

You can follow us on Twitter @Petrolholics