Along the Mille Miglia, A Thousand Miles of Classic Cars

If you ever doubt that people have lost their love of speed and driving, make a pilgrimage to Italy in May, and look for the crowds cheering by the road.

The Mille Miglia, for those not in the know, is a storied, thousand-mile time rally competition that dates back to 1927, with a route that varies slightly from year to year, but always starts and stops in Brescia, Italy. The only cars eligible to compete must date back to 1927 to 1957, when the challenge was an actual race, not a rally, and some 450 or so vintage cars of said vintages are invited to attend every year.

I came to Mille Miglia as a guest of Bentley, which brought one of its famous “Blower Bentleys,” a palatial “British Racing Green” 1930 4 ½-Litre supercharged model worth an estimated $5 million, and which graciously lent me and another journalist from England a white Continental GT V8-S—worth a comparatively paltry quarter-mil—for the duration of the event. (Not a bad place to spend 1,000 miles, it turns out.) But from the pre-Mille shotgun ride I was given in the green behemoth through the next thousand miles that followed in the Connie GT, it became clear that Mille Miglia is not just about the cars, it’s also about the people that love them.

Indeed, Mille fans are perhaps the best part of the event. And they’re everywhere. From the big cities to the rural landscapes, flag-waving Italians lined nearly every mile of the thousand-mile course, which started in Brescia, headed down to Rimini, then to Rome, back up to Parma and returned to Brescia over four days. To maximize exposure to the locals (and certainly to attract economic activity) the course avoided Italy’s autostradas, leading the “vintages” and their roughly 2,000 support and media vehicles through towns and villages large and small. While this made for slow, sometimes harrowing driving, it took us to parts of Italy few tourists ever see.

We pity the poor fools who didn’t know we were coming. Imagine going about your daily drive and nearly hitting head-on a $40 million Ferrari 250 Testa Rossa or a $10 million Jaguar D-Type (or both together) driving brazenly into oncoming traffic. But that’s what Mille Miglia compels its participants to do, and the locals simply (usually) get out of the way. If we were lucky, we’d be escorted by the polizia, but usually weren’t. Constabularies tended to “look the other way,” most of the time were cheering us on. Speed limits and red lights meant nothing to us. For four days in May, Italy is a lawless land.

For locals, then, it’s far safer to stay on the roadside during the four-to-six-hour window when the cars would drive by a given location. And many, many people would do just that. Not just yammering teenagers—though there are plenty of those—but a vast cross section of the Italian population, all getting up early and staying up late to watch the cars drive by for the four-to-six-hour window. Multiple generations of families stood together by their farmhouses. We saw an elderly woman waving on her balcony above a checkpoint in Rimini. One little girl no older than six on the side of a rural road alone in front of her house, waving excitedly as we drove by. A recently married couple walked among Bugattis in the Paizza del Campos in Siena. And you can imagine what happened if the route went near an elementary school. Yeah, it was one such sight after another.

Perhaps our favorite experience happened at nearly every traffic circle we encountered, where fans amassed near the course exit spot. Whereas the vintages issued cheers and flag waving, newer cars like the Bentley earned wild-eyed fist-pumps and foot stomps—Italian sign language for, “Hammer it!” Well, if you insist. At times, we would stop the car completely for a brake-torqued, full-throttle launch with the Bentley’s roaring turbocharged V-8 at full wail. Pure elation followed. This never got old.

At the end of the four days, somebody won the competition, but it’s fair to say that everybody wins the Mille Miglia. Not only because we spend all that time surrounded by beautiful old cars on beautiful old roads, but because those roads are full of people that are obviously enjoying themselves just as much as we are.

So lest anyone say that a day is coming when the world will fall out of love with automobiles, that day remains a long way away. At least in Italy.

(Of course, for some the Mille Miglia is all about the cars, so to see our extensive photo gallery of the gorgeous, rare, and astronomically valuable automobiles that took part in the challenge, click here.)