Remembering Mille Miglia

The moment man took the horse out of the equation, some clever fellow thought it would be a great idea to race the resulting car to the next town. And thus was born the great road race, over a century ago.

And there has been no greater road race than the Mille Miglia, not even the Targa Florio, Paris to Madrid, or the epic Carrera Panamericana can compare. For thirty years from 1927, villages, hamlets — and a few cities — would be lined with spectators shaking, anticipating the next car, trembling with excitement for the few seconds they'd catch a glimpse of a Ferrari or an Alfa. And then in a flash, they were gone; Piero Taruffi, Achille Varzi or Italy's darling Tazio Nuvolari, forever disappearing through yet another treacherous blind curve. At least until next year.

However, after the horrific death of the dashing playboy and Spanish nobleman Alfonso de Portago in 1957 (he was sliced in half as he took 11 others with him to the grave), the Mille Miglia was never run again.

This heroic marathon meandered through the finest countryside the little southern European peninsula could offer, and consequently its worst roads. Much of the original route was just about good enough for donkeys, yet it now had to do for Alfas with gorgeous Zagato coachwork. There were at least a dozen variations on the route. But the most romanticised always started in Brescia, rocketed through Romeo and Juliet's Verona, bypassed Venice through Padua, ran down half the Adriatic through Rimini and Ancona, before turning inland towards the capital, the marvellous Tuscan countryside and Florence. From Florence, it would turn quickly to Bologna, and then towards the patient Tifosi in Modena, onwards to Parma, Piacenza and finally Brescia again. After a whole day of that (there were no driver swaps, but co-drivers were mechanics and cars were loaded with spares — you'd inevitably need them), even if you lost, you'd have gained quite an experience in sightseeing. One of the Mille Miglia's biggest pulling points was that a family saloon could race alongside pure-bred machines. Imagine an amateur with local knowledge of the roads dicing with a foreign superstar on tip toes. There was also weather to worry about, public traffic, lack of food and water, breakdowns, bandits and wolves (yes, really), mud, dust and any other nuisance you can think of.

Today there is still a Mille Miglia classic reunion of sorts, but this is now merely an ‘average speed' rally and bears no resemblance to the public road race of old. In fact no race today bears any resemblance to these antique and tortuous tests of man and machine. Can you even imagine letting 300 or so road-legal supercars loose on open highways and B-roads, cheered by policemen, royals and peasants alike all throughout the race? The Mille Miglia is truly an esteemed treasure of the motoring world. Never mind that something similar would never be allowed today. Let's celebrate the fact that it existed at all.