Enzo Ferrari relocated his workshop to Maranello in 1943, choosing a flat stretch of Emilian farmland twenty kilometres south of Modena because Allied bombing had made urban production impossible. The first car bearing the Ferrari name, the 125 S, left the Via Abetone Inferiore factory in 1947 with a 1.
5-litre V12 designed by Gioacchino Colombo. That same engine architecture, refined across eight decades, powers the 488 GTB and Portofino models available for test drives today. The Museo Ferrari Maranello opened in 1990 inside the original Scuderia headquarters at Via Alfredo Dino Ferrari 43, preserving the wind tunnel, design studios, and chassis assembly bays that defined Formula One engineering from the 1950s onward.
Maranello remains the sole production site for all Ferrari road cars. Roughly 14,000 vehicles leave the Maranello plant each year, each hand-assembled across a forty-station line that spans six hectares. The museum anchors the town's northern edge, a fifteen-minute walk from the Cittadella complex where chassis testing and aerodynamic validation occur daily. Visitors booking a Maranello tour test drive package typically combine museum entry with a thirty- to sixty-minute drive on the SP623 toward Sassuolo or the SR413 loop past Formigine, roads the factory uses for production validation runs. These routes climb through vineyard-lined hills that yield Lambrusco and traditional balsamic vinegar, offering straights long enough to reach the 488's seven-thousand-rpm power band and corners tight enough to demonstrate the Portofino's electromechanical steering calibration.
The museum's permanent collection rotates annually but always includes Dino Ferrari's 1956 prototype office, the 1975 312 T driven by Niki Lauda, and the F2004 that secured Michael Schumacher's seventh championship. A dedicated hall traces the evolution of the Tipo 050 hybrid power unit introduced in 2014. Temporary exhibitions in 2026 focus on the SF90 Stradale's plug-in architecture and the Purosangue SUV platform. Entry costs twenty-seven euros and includes access to the GT simulator bay and the Fiorano lap-time archive, which logs every development mule's performance since 1972. Combined itineraries that bundle driving experiences with local food tours typically add a stop at an acetaia in Spilamberto or a trattoria in Vignola, where culatello, tortellini in brodo, and gnocco fritto reflect the same artisan precision Ferrari applies to camshaft grinding and carbon-ceramic brake disc curing.
1 hr 10 min
