Maranello Masterpieces: The Legacy of Enzo Ferrari

Ferrari's famously exotic cars are natural subjects for an exhibit at The Petersen Automotive Museum, so the new exhibit, Maranello Masterpieces: The Legacy of Enzo Ferrari, should provide a treat for museum visitors.

The museum introduces the exhibit with this explanation for the mystique of Ferrari and his cars:

At the age of 10, Enzo Ferrari attended his first automobile race, the Coppa Florio in Bologna. It had a profound effect on him, and 12 years later he would sell the house he grew up in to buy a race car. For the next two decades, Enzo drove race cars for Alfa Romeo and then led Scuderia Ferrari, his own race team, which acted as Alfa's racing division. After the outbreak of World War II, with European motorsports activity suspended, Ferrari survived by manufacturing machine tools for the military.

By the war's end, he was anxious to return to building fast cars. Reassembling much of his engineering team from his pre-war Alfa days, Enzo began work on a new race car that would feature a novel small-displacement 12-cylinder engine. From there, Ferrari would build a company whose name has become synonymous with speed and style.

From the 125 S in 1947 to the 1987 F40, the Ferrari cars built during Enzo's lifetime are some of the most influential, and desirable, race and sports cars in automobile history. And the cars that have come out of the factory in Maranello, Italy, since Enzo's death have continued his legacy by being the standard by which performance automobiles are judged.

Our gallery contains some of the highlights from this impressive collection of Maranello's finest.