Tracing the roots of Enzo Ferrari

MODENA, Italy -- For more than 2,000 years, the Via Emilia has connected Rimini on Italy's Adriatic coast and the city of Piacenza in the north. Completed in 187 BC, the Roman road draws a diagonal line across the country, dividing the Apennine Mountains to the south and Italy's fertile plains to the north.

The original Via Emilia has been lost to centuries of human development, but the road is still traceable on modern maps under the name 'SS9'. Heading in the direction of Piacenza, it runs through a string of Renaissance cities -- including Bologna, Modena and Parma -- and for the most part remains distinctly Roman in its ruler-straight direction of travel.

Sat in rush-hour traffic on the approach to Modena in mid-February, there's little else to marvel at than the complete lack of corners. There is no evidence of the Hannibalic War that waged in this area before the road's original construction, no evidence of the two Roman legions that were decimated by Spartacus' rebel army in 72 BC, and no evidence of the French invasions that forced the Duke of Modena to flee in the early part of the 18th century.

But one name from history is almost inescapable in this part of the world: Enzo Ferrari.

Alongside Luciano Pavarotti, he is Modena's most famous son. But unlike the tenor, Ferrari has had a physical impact on this region. From souvenir shops and restaurants trading off his name to suppliers of his famous company, 30 years after his death you are never far from a connection to Enzo Ferrari in this part of the world.

That's helpful for my purposes as it's the roots of his legacy that have brought me to Modena on a crisp morning in early Februrary. By the evening, that legacy will have extended even further with the launch of the all-new Ferrari F1 car for 2020 -- the SF1000 -- but in the meantime I have roughly eight hours to kill tracing the history of motoring's biggest icon.

Ferrari have loaned me a Portofino road car to complete the trip, which, in this part of Italy, helpfully doubles as a free parking pass for some of the locations on my list. It's Ferrari's entry-level car (albeit one worth over £200,000), but still comes with a distinct ability to turn heads and prompt questions from curious locals. But awkward conversations in broken Italian aside, it's the perfect tool for the job.

Modena: Where it all began

In tracing the history of Enzo Ferrari, there is only one place to start. To the south of the train track that runs through the north of Modena, the Museo Enzo Ferrari is split between two buildings. One is an ultra-modern structure sculpted from glass and yellow cladding, the other an old workshop with the words OFFICINA MECCANICA ALFREDO FERRARI across its frontage. The latter belonged to Ferrari's father, Alfredo, and operated as a small foundry supplying cast iron to the Italian national railway. It was also the birthplace of Enzo.

Look online and Enzo Ferrari's date of birth is listed as Feb. 18, 1898, but according to his birth certificate it was Feb. 20. The story goes that his arrival in the world coincided with a heavy snowstorm and his father's trip to Modena's registry office was delayed by two days. But regardless of the date, his birthplace is now a point of pilgrimage for loyal Ferrari fans the world over and has been restored to pristine condition and converted into a museum.

A number of Ferrari engines are on display in the workshop as well as a rotating collection of race and road cars in the ultra-modern wing of the museum, completed in 2012. The collection ranges from a single-cylinder prototype for the team's 1992 F1 engine to the car that took Ferrari's 100th F1 win in the hands of Alain Prost in 1990. But arguably the most interesting artefacts are found in the display cabinets lining the walls of the main workshop, including a pair of his distinctive dark glasses and a sample of his handwriting -- notable and instantly recognisable by the vivid purple ink he always used.

Just 1 kilometre south of Ferrari's birthplace is a large four-storey townhouse on Largo Garibaldi. It's the next stop on my tour, but would more fittingly be the last. In a small bedroom on the first floor of the building, Ferrari passed away in the midst of a heatwave on Aug. 14, 1988. His death came one day before a national holiday and was not immediately reported in the national media, allowing for a private funeral to take place at the family tomb at the San Cataldo Cemetery on the outskirts of Modena.

The tomb stands tall in the middle of the cemetery, with the famous surname inscribed in capital letters above the entrance. The epitaph reads "Ad maora ultra vitam" -- towards a greater life beyond.

A concrete car park

Yet Modena is still more closely linked to Ferrari's early life than to his death, and just around the corner from the Largo Garibaldi townhouse is one of the most important addresses in his story: 11 Viale Trento e Trieste.

Originally a stable for draught horses, the address and the 19th-century building that once stood there was purchased by Ferrari in 1930 with the help of a million-lire loan from a local bank. It was primarily used as an early base for the Scuderia Ferrari racing team, but doubled as the Ferrari family home for nearly four decades and continued to serve as a private office for Enzo until the final few years of his life.

It was from that building that Ferrari race-prepped pre-war Alfa Romeos and made his name in the racing world as a team owner. It was also in that building that the prancing horse was first painted onto the bonnet of a racing car, although the exact details of that story are also shrouded in Ferrari mythology.

Legend has it that the logo initially belonged to an Italian fighter ace, Francesco Baracca, who flew with it painted on his planes and shot down 34 enemy aircraft in World War I. The link to Ferrari comes from Enzo's older brother, Dino, who worked on the ground crew of Baracca's squadron.

Dino died from disease during the war and Baracca was shot down in 1918, but once the fighting had ended a chance meeting between Enzo Ferrari and Baracca's father, Count Enrico Baracca, led to the creation of one of the best-known logos in world.

"From that first meeting another followed with the mother, Countess Paolina," Ferrari later wrote. "It was she who told me one day, 'Ferrari, put the prancing horse of my son on your racing car. It will bring you luck.'

"I still keep the photograph of Baracca with the dedication by the parents in which they entrusted me with the emblem. The horse was, and has remained, black, but I myself added the yellow background, this being the colour of Modena."

Other than Ferrari's account of the meeting, there is very little evidence to support the story, and some historians argue it was made up by Ferrari to add a deeper meaning to the now-famous logo.

One reason for the scepticism is that there was a period of nine years between the meeting and the first time a prancing horse appeared on a Scuderia Ferrari race car. Another reason is that it may not have been a Baracca family crest at all but in fact the horse of Stuttgart that Francesco Baracca had added to his war plane after shooting down a German fighter using the same logo.

Regardless of its provenance, the logo became a permanent fixture on the engine covers of the Alfa Romeos run by Scuderia Ferrari in the 1930s and made a return when Ferrari started producing his own cars from 1947 onwards.

Yet for all the mythology around Enzo Ferrari, he was not one for sentimentality. In 1986, just a couple of years before his death, he agreed to a proposal from Modena's urban planners to demolish his legendary workshop and turn the plot into a multistorey car park. The concrete monstrosity that emerged at 11 Trento e Trieste has been subject to complex legal disputes for over 30 years, but was recently saved from its own demolition by Ferrari's son, Piero, who stepped in to keep it standing.

Part of Piero's reasoning was that his father had agreed to give the address over to the municipality to improve parking facilities for Modena's old city and had approved of the multi-storey complex himself. The irony is that had the the original workshop survived, it would likely be one of the main tourist attractions in Modena and would probably attract as many visitors as the old city itself.

But Ferrari's willingness to see it demolished is perhaps no surprise. This is a man who would routinely call for his race cars be cannibalised at the end of the season -- regardless of their championship success -- in order to create parts and spares for new ones.

One of Ferrari's most famous quotes remains: "What's my favourite Ferrari? It's the one that has yet to be built."

Maranello: the heart of modern-day Ferrari

Despite having run Alfa Romeo's racing cars with considerable success for nearly a decade, the original Scuderia Ferrari based out of Modena was closed down on Jan. 1, 1938, as Alfa Romeo moved its racing division in-house. As part of the agreement, Ferrari continued to run the renamed Alfa Corse racing department but signed a contract that prevented him from setting up a car manufacturer under his own name for a period of four years.

Ferrari lasted just over a year as an employee of Alfa Romeo before returning to Modena to set up his own car company. Unable to call it Ferrari, he named it Auto Avio Costruzioni and the old Scuderia Ferrari workshop on 11 Viale Trento e Trieste was back in use.

Amid concerns Modena would become a target for Allied bombing, Ferrari moved his new company to nearby Maranello in 1942 where he had bought a plot of land on which he had received permission to renovate "a large metal shed". The company was listed as Auto Avio Costruzioni on the official documents, but the papers also had prominent Scuderia Ferrari lettering on them -- a clear indication that the prancing horse would return to the scene once the four-year agreement with Alfa Romeo was up.

The resulting building at 4 Via Abetone Inferiore has barely changed in its 70-year history. If it weren't for the metre-high signage above the entrance, the two-storey building would appear unremarkable from the outside. Its design is based loosely on the style of a traditional Emilia-Romagna farm building and was limited to a low-rise structure due to a shortage in steel during its wartime construction.

Yet the factory's modest entrance has become another point of pilgrimage for Ferrari fans around the world, and since 1947 some of the world's most desirable road cars have rolled out of its archway and past the gatehouse. Those lucky enough to gain access to the factory beyond will find a high-tech facility to rival any other manufacturer around the world.

But with time ticking away, 4 Via Abetone Inferiore is just a short stop on my journey south of Modena. The road name gives a hint at the next destination, and it's still a good 90-minute drive into the Apennine Mountains.

The Abetone Pass

A ski resort situated 1,388 metres above sea level, Abetone is my final destination before a quick blast back to Reggio Emilia to catch the launch of the SF1000. The roads leading up to it are favoured by modern-day Ferrari test drivers as they offer challenging corners and mixed road conditions -- plus very little traffic to get in the way.

But there is also a historical reason for this trip south. Sat at the top of the mountain range is the Abetone Pass, which forms a small stretch of the Circuito delle Tre Province -- the road-based circuit that hosted the last event Enzo Ferrari ever entered as a racing driver in August 1931.

Ferrari had enjoyed a successful career behind the wheel, but by the late 1920s it had become clear he was a cut below the very best. In July 1931, his wife, Laura, told him she was pregnant and with that news he decided that the time trial the following month at the Circuito delle Tre Province would be his last.

To go out with a bang, he gave himself a fighting chance in the fastest car at his disposal, an Alfa Romeo 8C Monza, while his top driver, Tazio Nuvolari, was demoted to a six-cylinder Alfa Romeo 1750. By this stage of his career Ferrari knew Nuvolari was the more talented driver, but given his superior equipment and the fact Nuvolari had never driven the roads, he might have fancied his chances of one last victory.

According to Richard Williams' biography, 'Enzo Ferrari: A Life', the pair set off on a reconnaissance lap before the start with Nuvolari at the wheel. What emerged from that drive was a first-hand account of Nuvolari's skill behind the wheel and Ferrari's recognition that he didn't have what was needed to compete with his racing driver.

"At the first corner, I was certain that Tazio had taken it badly and that we were going to end up in a ditch," Ferrari wrote. "I braced myself for the shock. Instead we found ourselves at the beginning of the straight with the car pointing down it.

"I looked at Nuvolari: his rugged face betrayed not the slightest emotion, not the slightest sign of relief at having avoided a 180-degree skid.

"At the second bend, and again at the third, the same thing happened. At the fourth or fifth, I began to understand how he managed it, for from the corner of my eye I noticed that he never took his foot off the accelerator but kept it pressed flat on the floorboards.

"Bend by bend, I discovered his secret. Nuvolari went into the bend rather sooner than would have been suggested to me by my own driving instinct. But he went into it in an unusual way, that is to say, suddenly pointing the nose of the car at the inner verge just where the bend started.

"With the throttle wide open -- and having, of course, changed down into the right gear before that terrifying charge -- he put the car into a controlled four-wheel skid, utilising the centrifugal force and keeping the machine on the road by the driving force of its rear wheels.

"Right round the whole of the bend, the car's nose shaved the inner verge and, when the bend came to an end, the machine was pointing down the straight without any need to correct its trajectory."

It's no wonder that in his later life, when asked who the greatest driver of all time was, Ferrari simply said: "Nuvolari".