Museo Tazio Nuvolari

Mantua's most beloved sportsman gets a museum worthy of his legend: a deconsecrated church filled with trophies, goggles, gloves and the yellow jersey of Tazio Nuvolari, the driver whom Ferdinand Porsche is said to have called the greatest of past, present and future.

Why it matters

Tazio Nuvolari (1892–1953), born at Castel d'Ario near Mantua and a resident of the city all his life, was the most celebrated racing driver of the interwar years — winner of the 1935 German Grand Prix at the Nürburgring against far superior machinery, twice Mille Miglia victor, European champion on four wheels in 1932 and on motorcycles in 1925. The museum, curated with the Automobile Club of Mantua, keeps his trophies and personal effects in the city where he lived, raced from, and died. It is a compact, emotionally direct museum: not a hall of machines, but the private material of one career.

What to notice

• The golden turtle sent to Nuvolari by the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio in 1932, inscribed to the fastest man from the slowest animal and sent with a challenge to win that year's Targa Florio — which he did. It stayed his lucky charm for the rest of his life, sewn to his racing suit.
• The famous yellow jersey and the working kit of a 1930s driver: helmets, gloves, goggles, arranged at intimate close range rather than behind institutional distance.
• Trophies and gold medals from a career of some 227 automobile races and 124 motorcycle races, spanning three decades interrupted only by war.
• Period race films and scale models, including evocations of the Mille Miglia drives that made his reputation.
• The building itself: the former Chiesa del Carmelino, its single hall turning a church nave into a shrine of a very different kind of devotion.

Context and history

Nuvolari's connection to Mantua was total: he ran his car repair business in the city, lived there with his family, and at his death in August 1953 asked to be buried in the monumental cemetery in his racing clothes — the yellow monogrammed sweater, blue trousers and brown leather jacket — with his favourite steering wheel beside him. His funeral on 13 August 1953 drew tens of thousands onto the streets, with the coffin escorted by the racing men of the day, Ascari, Villoresi and Fangio among them. The collection that became the museum was assembled and is still preserved and promoted by the Automobile Club of Mantova, and it shares its site's history with the small church of the former Carmelite settlement on Via Giulio Romano, on the axis linking Palazzo Ducale with Palazzo Te — the route Nuvolari's cars once took through the city.

The nickname by which he is remembered, the Flying Mantuan, belongs to the city as much as to the man. The museum preserves photographs, memorabilia and audiovisual material as part of Mantua’s civic memory.