The chance to visit the Museo Enzo Ferrari, one of the world's great car museums, AND experience the whole Italian hullabaloo surrounding the opening of a new exhibition was too good to pass up. Especially when we heard Sir Stirling Moss was coming.
LDM opened exhibition; a man in demand!
It wasn't even a Ferrari exhibit, but one celebrating 100 years of Maserati, whose claims on the museum's hometown of Modena, northern Italy, are arguably greater given that the brand's been here for 70-odd years.
But the fact this gem of a museum is based around the house Enzo Ferrari was born in (there's another Ferrari museum at Maranello 10 miles away) and that both marques are Fiat stablemates was obviously was enough for Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo to introduce the whole thing.
Our Italian wasn't up to scratch to understand his speech, but we're told it included a public prod to his F1 team to start winning races. Quite right. According to the press release, he also got in a bit of deft self-congratulation for Ferrari's 1997 rescue of Maserati from "quasi-neglect" (he's very posh).
He was then mobbed by the Italian press and we were finally let into the sensational modernist hanger next to Enzo's house that until January will contain 16 Maseratis plucked from the brand's back catalogue.
Well of course a 250F stars
They really are stunning, rendered even more so by the astonishing museum space that shuts out all natural light in favour of dramatic spot-lighting of the cars, some of which 'float' on white plinths elevated from the white floor.
It kicks off with the single-seater cars that established the Maserati brothers as the go-to guys for 'gentleman racers' looking to buy cars with real podium potential. The Tipo 26 was the first to wear the Trident badge on the grille, nicked from a Neptune statue in their hometown of Bologna, and this straight-eight 1929 version's rough-and-ready patina spoke of much re-beating and painting of panels after shunts and prangs on street circuits. Wonderful to look at.
The most famous Maserati single-seater was also there, the front-engined 250F Formula 1 car that elevated Moss into the limelight after he bought one as a privateer, and Juan Manuel Fangio drove to championship victory in 1954 and 1957. Dinky little thing, and really quite beautiful.
'Eldorado' version rather less appealing
Less tasty was the 'Eldorado' version that Maserati built for a sort of Ryder Cup of racing back in 1957 that pitched US cars versus European machines at the so-called 500 Miglia staged at the Monza oval. Moss drove it, complete with new-fangled sponsorship decals from an ice-cream company, but told us he was a DNF after the steering column sheared (more from Moss in a forthcoming story).
The show did illustrate that Maserati has had a somewhat troubled relationship with design. The sheer number of Italian coachbuilder/designers it worked with is staggering, as revealed by the many 'carrozzerie' logos on the bodies, and not all got it right. Pininfarina's work on Maser's first road car, the 1947 A6 1500, looks like an Austin from the front end and gives little indication there's a race-car underneath.
And the front-engined 60/61 Tipo Birdcage racer, named for the intricate network of rods that formed the chassis, was shockingly ugly for its day, even if history has forgiven it and elevated prices in the multiple millions. We liked that the 1960 version here had a UK tax disc showing (expired).
But other cars were simply beautiful. The 1959 3500GT Vignale Spyder would make anyone go weak at the knees, especially from the back. And Pininfarina definitely redeemed itself with very limited edition A6 GCS/53 Berlinetta from 1953. The sign says this car continues to be influential in the company today, and you definitely see an evolution of that thrusting, concave grille on the GranTurismo made a few miles down the road.
It was Maserati's loss it didn't take up the ItalDesign's Boomerang concept from 1971 based on a Bora, but Lotus's gain given designer Giorgetto Giugiaro clearly still remembered it when he went on to create the Esprit.
We did have a peer into the elegantly gutted main house to peer at Enzo's history of cars, including four Alfa Romeos from the days he ran their cars on his race team, but Maserati stole the show here. Even if we did discover its dirty (clean?) secret via a wonderful pamphlet mounted in a cabinet display: in the dark days of WWII the firm also made electric vans.
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