Mille Miglia: The Thousand-Mile Italian Road Race That Ran From 1927 to 1957

The Mille Miglia, or Thousand Miles, was an open-road endurance race that ran through Italy from 1927 until 1957. Its course left Brescia, dropped south to Rome and returned north to the same city, and along the way it made grand touring marques such as Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche famous. A run of fatal accidents brought the original race to an end in 1957.

What was the Mille Miglia?

The Mille Miglia was founded in 1927 by two young counts, Aymo Maggi and Franco Mazzotti. It was a road race for production-based cars, run over a long course that the founders hoped would rival the great events of their era.

Renzo Castagneto, a sports manager, and the journalist Giovanni Canestrini were also among the group behind the event. They picked a figure-of-eight style course that headed south to Rome and back, which the Italians thought of as a thousand Roman miles. Over the years twelve other routes were tried, each with a different mix of mountains, coastal roads and the flat plains of the north.

The race ran 24 times between 1927 and 1957, with 13 editions before the Second World War and 11 after 1947. From 1953 to 1957 it also counted towards the World Sports Car Championship, and crowds along the roads were estimated at around 5 million across the event's life.

A thousand miles of open road made grand touring legends, and the crowds that lined it paid the highest price.

How did the first race go in 1927?

The first event attracted 77 Italian entrants, and only 51 cars reached the finish in Brescia. The course stretched 1,618 km, and the rules allowed only unmodified production cars to take part. Entry cost a nominal one lira, which reflected the aim of testing ordinary road cars.

The winner, Giuseppe Morandi, took the flag after just under 21 hours 5 minutes. He averaged nearly 78 km/h (48 mph) in a 2-litre OM, and that Brescia-based manufacturer filled the top three places. Early starters had to leave before midnight and many drivers would finish long after dark, which made the event a test of stamina as much as speed.

Who won the race during its early decades?

Tazio Nuvolari won the 1930 race in an Alfa Romeo 6C, after starting behind his team-mate Achille Varzi. Trailing Varzi on the approach to Brescia, Nuvolari ran with his headlights off, so that Varzi could not spot him in his mirrors. He then pulled alongside on the straight road into the finish and switched his lights back on.

Foreign cars won only three times in the event's early years. The first came in 1931, when Caracciola and his riding mechanic Wilhelm Sebastian took a supercharged Mercedes-Benz SSKL to the finish. Their average was the first over 100 km/h (63 mph) on the course, although Caracciola had little factory backing and not enough mechanics for every service point.

What made the 1938 and 1939 races so significant?

The 1938 race ended in tragedy near Bologna, when a car ran into spectators. Eleven spectators died in total that year. The disaster was so serious that the future of the event was settled at the highest level of government, by Benito Mussolini himself.

The 1939 edition was not run on the Italian roads. Instead the organisers staged the Litoranea Libica from Tobruk to Tripoli in Libya, then an Italian colony. Ercole Boratto, Mussolini's own chauffeur, took the win. The race returned in April 1940, shortly before Italy entered the war, as the Grand Prix of Brescia on a 100 km triangle across the plains.

That 1940 event also saw the debut of AAC, the first marque owned by Enzo Ferrari, with its Tipo 815. The fastest car was the BMW 328 of Huschke von Hanstein and Walter Baumer, who averaged 166 km/h (103 mph) over the short course.

Could the race return after the war?

The accidents of 1938 faded from public memory during the war. Three of the original organisers, minus Franco Mazzotti who had died in the fighting, pressed for permission to run the race again. In 1947 they won approval, and the government found enough petrol for the event despite rationing.

Pirelli offered four free tyres for every car that registered, and entries flooded in. Many of those who signed up wanted the petrol and tyres more than the race, and some had no intention of starting. The first post-war race was again entirely Italian, since British and French teams could not travel amid currency shortages and German teams were excluded for political reasons.

Even in 1948 Donald Healey and his son Geoffrey were the only non-Italians, and they finished ninth in a Healey Westland roadster. Mercedes-Benz came back in 1952 with the 300 SL Gullwing, taking second place with Karl Kling and Hans Klenk, who later that year won the Carrera Panamericana. Caracciola was back too, finishing fourth. Non-Italian drivers were rare on the podium in the 1950s, though Fangio, Peter Collins and Wolfgang von Trips did manage it.

Why is the 1955 Moss and Jenkinson run so famous?

In 1955 Mercedes-Benz returned with the 300 SLR, a sports car derived from the thinking behind its Formula One W196. Hans Herrmann and Stirling Moss both took navigators, while Juan Manuel Fangio preferred to drive alone. He had grown wary of open-road racing after a friend and co-pilot died during a race in South America.

Moss and his navigator, the journalist Denis Jenkinson, completed six reconnaissance laps before the race. Jenkinson wrote out the route on a paper scroll 18 feet (540 cm) long and read it out during the race, using a code of fifteen hand signals to tell Moss what lay ahead. Moss's talent and the 300 SLR's build quality were the decisive factors, and the car's design, based on a Formula One machine, made it unusual on public roads, but the preparation helped close the gap to drivers who knew the roads.

Moss and Jenkinson reached Brescia in 10 hours 7 minutes 48 seconds, a pace averaging 157.650 km/h, or 97.96 mph, over the 1,597 km variant. That record was never beaten. The weather also worked in their favour, as the race ran without rain at any point, which was unusual for a route that almost always had showers somewhere.

Fangio arrived minutes later, having started 24 minutes earlier, so his effective time was about half an hour slower. Engine trouble at Pescara and a broken fuel-injection pipe near Florence left him running on seven cylinders for the final stretch. Herrmann's race ended on the Futa Pass when his brakes failed, and Kling crashed just outside Rome.

How dangerous was the Mille Miglia?

The race was notorious for its danger, both for drivers and spectators. Over its 30-year life, 56 people died. The dead included 24 drivers and co-drivers and 32 spectators. Most of the fatal accidents happened on the quickest sections, and nearly all of them involved people watching from the roadside.

The opening stretch between Brescia and Ravenna was the most dangerous, because cars reached their highest speeds there, on roads lined with crowds. More than half of the deaths in the 1950s happened on that stretch. Thirty-five of the 56 fatalities came between 1948 and 1957, which works out at close to four per race. Only the editions of 1927, 1931 to 1934 and 1936 to 1937 passed without a fatal accident.

Why did the race end in 1957?

Racing ended after two crashes in the 1957 event. The first involved a factory Ferrari 335 S, a 4.0-litre sports car, which struck a crowd near Guidizzolo. A worn tyre hitting a road marker started the chain of events, and a second fatal crash followed at Florence.

A worn tyre had struck the raised edge of a road marker, and that started the chain of events. The second fatal crash came at Florence, where the Dutch driver Joseph Gottgens died in heavy rain while driving a Triumph TR3. The two accidents, on top of the danger that had built up over the decade, brought an end to the race as a flat-out road contest.

What did the race look like after 1957?

From 1958 to 1961 the event went on as a rally-style contest, restricted to legal speeds and a handful of timed special stages. After 1961 it was discontinued permanently. The original route had changed many times before then, and the final version passed through Mantua.

The route itself changed many times. The 1927 to 1930 variant ran anticlockwise through Rome, Perugia and Porto Recanati, and the 1947 course was the longest of all at 1,132 mi (1,822 km), run clockwise. The 1949 version was reversed again and shortened to about 1,000 mi (1,600 km). In 1954 a new section was added in honour of Tazio Nuvolari, passing through his hometown of Mantua.

How was the Mille Miglia revived?

The event was reborn in 1977 as the Mille Miglia Storica, a regularity event for classic and vintage cars built no later than 1957. Entrants must be cars that could have taken part in the original event, which keeps the field faithful to the past.

A separate road rally brought back the name in 1982. The Storica parade takes several days to complete, which gives a sense of how demanding the original race was. The modern event still begins and ends in Brescia.

A separate road rally brought back the Mille Miglia name in 1982. Since November 2004 a museum of the race has occupied the old Sant'Eufemia monastery in Brescia, with films, posters, period clothing and classic cars.

What is the legacy of the Mille Miglia?

The name still carries weight. It remains one of the best-known names in Italian motoring. The Automobile Club Brescia, the body behind the modern event, owns the trademark, and the name has been licensed to a Chopard sports watch series, promoted with photographs by Giacomo Bretzel.

The name has also turned up in unexpected places, including the frequent flyer programme of the airline Alitalia, which was called Mille Miglia. Chevrolet used a shade called Mille Miglia Red on its Corvettes between 1972 and 1975, and arcade games based on the race appeared in 1994 and 1995. The race has also appeared in popular culture, from a song by Lucio Dalla about the 1947 edition to a fashion label's jacket named after the race.

In 2008 Alfa Romeo built a small run of eleven Tipo 939 Spider cars, numbered to match the marque's wins in the race. Michael Mann's 2023 film Ferrari, meanwhile, follows Enzo Ferrari through the summer of 1957 as his team prepares for the event, which shows how firmly the race remains in the public imagination.