The magic of Maserati’s museum overpowers its farm-fresh smell
Collection includes rare masterpieces and even a couple of motorcycles
The world’s foremost collection of historic Maseratis smells like cow manure. Absolutely reeks of it. And, if your nostrils aren’t sufficiently affronted by the acrid stench of bovine feces, then they’ll also be tested by the smell of Italian Parmesan cheese. And not the wimpy young stuff, either. Welcome to the Panini Motor Museum, the passion of one Umberto Panini, who, as you may have guessed by my olfactory-influenced introduction, was also a dairy farmer. Not much of a story in that; plenty of rich dudes own plenty of fantastically expensive cars. But how he came to own 19 of the most important Maseratis in the world? Well now, that’s a story. Maserati, founded by four brothers — Alfieri, Bindo, Ernesto and Ettore — has seen more than its share of ups and downs over the years. Since it was established in 1914, it has been owned variously by Adolfo Orsi, car manufacturer Citroën and Alejandro de Tomaso. Indeed, it’s this last that caused so much consternation within the enthusiast ranks that Panini found himself thrust into Maserati folklore. In the early 1990s, it seems that de Tomaso, former race driver turned businessman who at various points owned his eponymously named company, Maserati, Innocenti, Ghia and Vignale, as well as Benelli and Moto Guzzi motorcycle manufacturers, found himself in yet another of his many financial squabbles. Broke, he sold Maserati to its current owner, Fiat (now Fiat Chrysler Automobiles). But, in a masterstroke — the incident is described in official Maserati history as de Tomaso having “one sting left in his tail” — the sale was contingent on the Argentine retaining ownership of the historic Maserati Collection, even though it remained at Maserati’s head office. Three years later, de Tomaso, in yet more financial difficulties, offered to sell Fiat the collection, but Fiat, for reasons still not clearly understood, declined. In a fit of piqué, the Argentine decided to send all 19 collectibles to England to be summarily sold at auction. Modena’s elite flew into a tizzy, sufficiently incensed to recruit Walter Veltroni, Italy’s minister of culture, and Modena’s then mayor, Giuliano Barbolini, to search out a white knight to (hopefully) buy the entire collection, lock, stock and barrel, and return the cars to their rightful home. Into this industrial soap opera stepped — you guessed it — one Umberto Panini, who at the last minute bought all the cars (at a “a very inflated price,” says one company historian) and then transported them all back to, well, his dairy farm. Perhaps most interesting, however, is that Panini had seemingly little interest in the cars, never, according to Collezione Umberto Panini’s current manager, actually driving any of them. (Though his son, Matteo, now the CUP’s curator, seems to have made up for his father’s disinterest). Umberto seems to have been fonder of his collection of rare farm tractors, pride of place going to a well worn Lamborghini. Yes, that Lamborghini. My God, though, one can see why the local politicians had their shorts in such a knot. Housed in the CUP is a 6CM (of which only 27 were made), which won the Targa Florio from 1937 to ’39. There’s even a couple of Maserati motorcycles — no, I didn’t know that either — that the company sold from 1953 to 1960. (Maserati bought out a company called Italmoto, but quickly re-engineered its lineup from little two-stroke mopeds to include some absolutely gorgeous, full-size 250-cc, fourstroke motorcycles that bear more than a passing resemblance to Matchlesses of the era.) And they’re hardly the highlight of the show, not garnering nearly the attention of, say, the 6C 34, a sibling to the car with which famed racer Tazio Nuvolari won the Naples and Modena Grands Prix in 1934. Or the lovely A6GCS 53 Berlinetta, one of four lovingly sculpted by Pininfarina. A 3500GT, the first modern “touring” Maserati, is also on display, as is a 250F driven by Juan Manuel Fangio, and a huge 420M — nicknamed Eldorado — that was raced by Stirling Moss in the 1958 500 Miglia di Monza. And, of course, there are more modern Mistrals, Ghiblis and Boras, not to mention a few token Alfa Romeos and Ferraris sprinkled in for good measure. Yet the exhibit that captured my attention was hardly a car. In fact, it was just the frame of a car — not a wheel or an engine to be seen — but what a technological marvel. For men of a certain age (as in those just about to turn the big 6-0) who still fondly remember their car-addicted roots, the Maserati that was always talked about with the most reverence was the Tipo 60/61. More famously known as the Birdcage, the Maserati was a revolution in 1959, when it first revealed its gorgeous profile. Streamlined for maximum efficiency, offering the perfect 50/50 weight distribution that BMW now claims as its own, engineer Giulio Alfieri’s masterpiece was a triumph of light weight over power, winning the 1960 Nürburgring 1000 in the hands of Stirling Moss and Dan Gurney. Its little 2.9-litre four-cylinder put out just 250 horsepower, but was housed in an incredible tubular spaceframe chassis, a compendium of more than 200 tiny chrome-molybdenum steel tubes welded together to form the strongest — yet lightest — triangular buttresses. Diagrams of its intricacy mesmerized me as a teenager and were at least part of the reason I decided to take up mechanical engineering as a métier (before I realized that auto journalists actually get to drive the supercars I hoped to design). The frame weighed but 36 kilograms and yet supported an entire racing car. This just astounded me and I thought that if, by some miracle, Carleton University’s mechanical engineering department might teach me how to design something equally ingenious, then learning calculus and how to use a slide rule might be worth the tedium. In the flesh, a bare Birdcage frame is just as captivating (to a lapsed engineer, anyway) as my remembrances. Indeed, the Maserati chassis reminds me of nothing more than one of those impossibly intricate laser beam security systems that Tom Cruise seems to foil in every Mission Impossible movie. That’s how many lovely crafted little steel tubes a Birdcage frame supports, all disposed at seemingly disparate angles. I know few will understand such romanticizing of simple steel tubing, but to a boy from northern Quebec who grew up in wonder of Continental engineering, finally seeing one in the flesh is not to be forgotten. Even if the place smelled like cow manure.