Construzioni Elettro Meccaniche di Saronno

CEMSA was founded in Saronno in 1925 by engineer Nicola Romeo and backed by Credito Italiano. It used the former factory of Costruzioni Meccaniche di Saronno which had closed in 1918. In 1935, after a series of writedowns of the share capital, the company was bought by Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI) and the following year it was sold to the aeronautical engineer Gianni Caproni who already controlled Isotta Fraschini.

During World War II, CEMSA built light weapons and, at the end of the war, the company started producing cars thanks to collaboration with the engineer Antonio Fessia,Antonio_Fessia who in 1946 had left FIAT. In a few months Fessia, who had transformed CEMSA into a company dedicated to the construction of sports cars, succeeded in designing a car with innovative technical characteristics, the CEMSA Caproni F.11, which was presented at the Paris Salon in 1947. Only 10 sedan cars of this model were produced. A cabriolet version was also planned but it was not realized due to the financial crisis that hit the company in 1948 and forced it to close. One of the prototypes of the F.11 was shipped to the United States, in the hope of concluding an agreement with the Tucker sales network for the distribution of the model in the US, but this project did not come to fruition because of the closure of the company. In 1953, the Belgian company, Minerva, bought an F.11 in an attempt to put it into production, but even this project failed.