The Mille Miglia Route: Brescia to Rome and Back on Open Roads
At half past seven in the morning on the first day of May 1955, a silver Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR carrying the race number 722 rolled down a wooden starting ramp in Brescia. Ten hours, seven minutes and forty-eight seconds later, Stirling Moss and his navigator Denis Jenkinson crossed the same line in the same city, having covered roughly a thousand miles of public Italian roads at an average speed of almost 158 km/h. No one had ever driven the Mille Miglia faster, and no one ever would. To understand how such a thing was even possible, you have to understand the route itself: a vast loop from Brescia to Rome and back that turned an entire country into a racetrack.
A wager born in a Brescia café
The Mille Miglia was conceived in Brescia in the mid-1920s by four men who have gone down in Italian motoring lore as the "four musketeers": the aristocratic racer Aymo Maggi, his wealthy friend Franco Mazzotti, the organiser Renzo Castagneto and the journalist Giovanni Canestrini. Brescia had been an early home of Italian Grand Prix racing, but the sport's centre of gravity had shifted to the new autodrome at Monza, near Milan. The four wanted to restore their city's motoring prestige, and their answer was deliberately audacious: not a race on a closed circuit, but a race across Italy itself, on ordinary roads, from Brescia down to Rome and back again. Mazzotti, who knew the Anglo-Saxon world well, is credited with suggesting the name: the distance worked out at roughly one thousand Roman miles, hence Mille Miglia. The first edition ran in March 1927 and was won by Ferdinando Minoia and Giuseppe Morandi in an OM, a car built in Brescia itself, after around twenty-one hours of continuous driving. The event was a sensation, and it would be repeated, war years aside, until 1957.
One thousand Roman miles
The figure of a thousand miles, about 1,600 kilometres, was never just marketing. It defined the character of the race. A Grand Prix of the era lasted a few hours; the Mille Miglia demanded that a crew drive flat out from before dawn until evening, through fog on the Po plain, heat on the Adriatic coast and gravel-strewn hairpins in the Apennines. The route changed in detail from year to year, as organisers adjusted the course, but its essential shape remained: a great loop anchored at Brescia in Lombardy and Rome in Lazio. Crucially, the roads were public. They were closed for the race in only the loosest sense, lined by millions of spectators standing at the roadside, in village squares, on bridges and balconies. Competitors started at intervals and raced against the clock rather than wheel to wheel, and in the post-war years each car's race number was simply its start time: Moss's famous 722 meant a start at 7:22 in the morning.
Down the plain and along the Adriatic
In its classic post-war configuration the route left Brescia heading east across the Po plain, through Verona, Vicenza and Padova, roads that were fast, flat and deceptively dangerous, since a car flat out on a tree-lined straight leaves no margin for error. From the Veneto the course dropped south through Ferrara and Ravenna to the Adriatic coast, where the character of the race changed again. Along the seaside towns of Rimini, Pesaro and Ancona the roads twisted through built-up areas, over railway crossings and around harbour fronts, and further south toward Pescara the coastal road offered long full-throttle stretches where the most powerful cars could stretch their legs. Pescara marked the point where the route finally turned its back on the sea and struck inland, climbing into the Abruzzo mountains toward L'Aquila before descending on Rome. It was an old saying among competitors that whoever led at Rome would not win in Brescia, a superstition that the results validated often enough to keep it alive.
Rome, the turning point, and the mountains home
Rome was the emotional halfway mark, but veterans knew the race was decided on the road home. From the capital the course climbed north through Lazio and southern Tuscany, over the long ascent to Radicofani, through Siena and on to Florence. Then came the section that drivers spoke about with the most respect: the crossing of the Apennines over the Futa and Raticosa passes on the road to Bologna. These were proper mountain roads, a relentless sequence of climbs, crests and hairpins where brakes faded, engines overheated and tired drivers made mistakes. A nimble, well-balanced car could claw back at Futa what it had lost to raw horsepower on the coast. After Bologna the route rejoined the plain for the final sprint across the Po valley, through Modena and past Piacenza or Cremona depending on the year, before the exhausted crews returned to the finish in Brescia.
The men who mastered the road
No driver is more closely associated with the race than Tazio Nuvolari, the Mantuan whose 1930 victory produced one of motorsport's most cherished legends: the story that he stalked his rival Achille Varzi in the pre-dawn darkness with his headlights switched off, revealing himself only when it was too late to respond. Whatever the literal truth, it captures what the Mille Miglia rewarded, which was road knowledge, nerve and cunning as much as speed. The statistical king of the event was Clemente Biondetti, who won it four times, a record never beaten. And the 1955 victory of Moss and Jenkinson added a technical revolution: Jenkinson condensed their reconnaissance of the entire route onto a long roll of paper wound inside an aluminium case, reading the road ahead to Moss through hand signals. It was, in effect, the birth of modern rally pace notes, and it allowed a foreigner to beat the Italians on roads they had known all their lives.
Guidizzolo and the end of an era
The same qualities that made the Mille Miglia magnificent also made it lethal. Racing cars shared the route with walls, ditches, trees and unprotected crowds, and the speeds of the 1950s had outgrown roads laid out for another age. In the 1957 race, won by Piero Taruffi for Ferrari, the Spanish aristocrat Alfonso de Portago suffered a tyre failure at very high speed near the village of Guidizzolo, not far from the finish. His Ferrari scythed into the roadside spectators, killing de Portago, his co-driver Edmund Nelson and a group of onlookers that included children. The tragedy provoked a national outcry, the Italian state banned open-road speed racing, and the Mille Miglia in its original form was finished after twenty-four editions. Enzo Ferrari, whose cars had dominated the post-war runnings, had called it the most beautiful race in the world; it had also become an indefensible one.
From race to rolling museum
The name refused to die. Since 1977 the Mille Miglia has lived on as a regularity rally for historic cars, open to models of the types that took part in, or were eligible for, the original races between 1927 and 1957. Every year a field of priceless pre-war Alfa Romeos, OMs, BMWs, Ferraris, Maseratis and Mercedes retraces a route between Brescia and Rome, and entire towns still turn out to watch, which is why the modern event is often described as a travelling museum. In Brescia, a dedicated Mille Miglia museum housed in a former monastery preserves the cars, photographs and documents of the original race, and the city remains, as the founders intended a century ago, the spiritual capital of the thousand miles.
Explore on the map
The best way to grasp the scale of the Mille Miglia is to trace its geography yourself, from Brescia across the Po plain, down the Adriatic coast, into Rome and back over the Tuscan passes. On our interactive map you can explore Italy's extraordinary density of motorsport venues, from the circuits of Monza and Imola to the roads and towns that once formed the most beautiful race route in the world, and see how the country that invented the thousand-mile race still lives and breathes motorsport today.