A Boy and His Red Stallion

There was only one place Gareth insisted that we visited while touring through Italy - the Ferrari Museum in Maranello. Boys will be boys, and this one was giddy with excitement the moment we had parked and the first of the red stallions screamed past us. Apparently you can also pay to drive one of these iconic supercars yourself for a few minutes and the streets of this otherwise sleepy town was filled with the roars of V12 engines. I asked Gareth if he wanted to have a go too, but just the thought of scratching a multimillion-Rand car on a narrow Italian road persuaded him to rather watch from the sidewalk instead.


The museum wasn’t really what we had expected. For some reason we thought it would be a lot more interactive, but instead we were confronted with a number of rooms that had various models of Ferraris on display. Gareth promptly pulled out the SLR and proceeded to take a picture of every single car while I, the exact antithesis of a petrol head (I drive a blue car), was soon bored.









However, I was pretty impressed by the sleek lines of the "La Ferrari" on display in the dark room. I can just picture the two of us cruising around Italy in this beauty, blue skies and sunshine overhead, my hair whipping in the breeze, dark shades on Gareth... Well, a girl can dream anyway, can’t she?



Afterwards, we ambled through the museum’s gift shop, but everything was too expensive for our limited budgets. We walked back to the car, Gareth grinning from ear to ear every time some lucky guy in a Ferrari drove past.

We had parked next to the official Ferrari store and ducked in to have a final perusal of their wares. They were actually cheaper than the museum’s gift shop. Caps, jackets, bags, key holders, notebooks, socks - you name it, all available for sale and proudly bearing the well-known prancing horse. Gareth joked that even if you can't afford the supercar, at least you can don yourself out from head to toe in Ferrari merchandise.




And guess what? Gareth actually managed to take his own Ferrari home!


Are you a supercar fan? Have you been to the Ferrari Museum in Maranello and what did you think of it? Any other car museums you would like to recommend in the comments below?

For more posts in the Ciao Italy 2014 series, click here.

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