If you are travelling around northern Italy, and a car nut, then you will almost certainly will be visiting some Ferrari related places. After our visit to Imola for the Grand Prix we headed to Maranello (by car as it isn’t so easy to go by train) to immerse ourselves in the Ferrari experience.
Maranello tourism department is certainly making the most of their Ferrari heritage and their slogan is Fast cars – Slow life. Finding your way to the museum is straightforward and the roads are not too busy and easy to navigate. The museum has a small car park and across the road there is public parking. However these do fill up quickly and the easiest thing to do is to head for the park and ride. Follow the signs to an industrial estate where you can park for free, and catch a bus right to the museum.
Most people have bought their tickets on line but you can easily get them at the entrance. As you would expect the museum is very stylish and has a huge prancing horse log designed for instagram (whatever that is!)
I have been to many car museums and a lot of them are simple open spaces crammed with cars. Not here, this is a visual assault of automotive artistry. There are no barriers to the cars other than lines on the floor which you must not pass. This is rigorously enforced by museum staff. Photography is easy apart from the lighting as it is mostly dark with the cars picked by spotlights, making pictures very contrasty.
Museo Ferrari (previously known as Galleria Ferrari) is the company museum dedicated to the Ferrari sports cars and racing. Here you can see not only stunning cars but also trophies, photographs and other historical objects. In addition to that, the exhibition introduces technological innovations, some of which had made the transition from racing cars to road cars.
It is located just 300 m (980 ft) from the Ferrari factory in their home town of Maranello near Modena. The museum opened in February 1990, with a new wing being added in October 2004. It attracts around 180,000 visitors a year.
The exhibits are mostly a combination of Ferrari road and track cars and it pleasing to see that many cars have stickers from major classic car events around the world including Goodwood. The museum has a revolving programme of exhibitions and it worth visiting the website to see what will be on when you visit. I won’t tell you about the exhibits, I’ll leave you with pictures.
After our visit we skipped the museum shop (very expensive) and headed for the cafe which had excellent coffee and reasonably priced food. After lunch we went to the factory for the obligatory picture at the factory gate.
But the entertainment doesn’t stop there. There are numerous places where you can hire a Ferrari for a drive around Maranello and some cheaper souvenier shops and model shops.
Entry to the museum was a reasonable £22
Website: https://www.ferrari.com/en-GB/museums
