Ferrari drive around Maranello

Maranello, Italy

10th May 2009

Anja and I changed our plans for the last few days of our trip. We left Tuscany early and head up to Maranello. Maranello is situated in a corridor of towns hosting various sports car manufacturers. This is the home region of Lamborghini, Bugatti and one special firm we paid a visit to: Ferrari.

The hotel we checked in to was dirt cheap, really big and next to a warehousing complex for truckers. The hotel interior was covered in pictures and paintings of various sports cars and most of the clients were middle-aged men who were dragging their wives from car factory to car factory to race course in this part of Italy.

Despite the industrial-sounding nature of the area, there are some lovely villages, wineries and we found an amazing restaurant were the staff spoke German. After a week of us needing to speak Italian because the various waiters and waitresses couldn't speak anything else, this was like finding water in the dessert.

We drove around the Ferrari factory, went to the museum, climbed over walls at the race track for a glimpse and I put down 70 euros to have an Italian gigolo with a suspended license drive me around Maranello in a Ferrari for 20 minutes. We managed to get up to 220KM/H, about 2.5x the speed limit and we would have gone faster had there not been a Fiat 500 blocking us on the road. I've been in cars in Germany that have done 240KM/H before but the speed at which the Ferrari 420 accelerated was like nothing I'd experienced before. We were on the road doing 90KM/H and when an opportunity arose, we shot up to 220KM/H in what must have been about 2.5 seconds. It was like a beast being unleashed faster than it could be tamed. The car would just shout, shake rapidly and suddenly you were being thrown at the road in front of you. The power of the breaking meant your eyeballs would reach their destination about a second before the rest of your body :)

I was shaking with adrenaline when the ride was over. It took about 45 minutes for my grin to wear off.

In the airport today I was lucky enough to find a TV just before passport control with the Formula 1 race on. There were a fair few others watching the race with me including the boarder guards. I kept my happiness at the Braun 1, 2 victory as I'm sure they would have burnt my passport in revenge.

All in all, I think we enjoyed Italy. I don't think we will ever consider moving there nor going on holiday there again anytime soon. Though the country is beautiful and some of the people are really friendly, I get the feeling that we're invading someone else's home uninvited and though they do their best to make us feel welcome, it's a bit obvious that we aren't.