1000 Miglia exhibition: a journey through the world's most beautiful race

The 1000 Miglia by Mailander, the unprecedented exhibition featuring some of the most significant shots taken by Rodolfo Mailander, photoreporter and later head of international relations for Fiat. 100 years after its birth, the exhibition tells the story of the trait d'union between culture, society and the automotive world, offering visitors a cross-section of a country united by its passion for racing.

The exhibition opens to the public on Friday 17 May, proposing a journey in stages in full 1000 Miglia style, involving four of the main car museums in Italy: Museo Mille Miglia in Brescia, Museo Nicolis in Villafranca di Verona, Museo Fratelli Cozzi in Legnano and, from 6 June 2024, Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile in Turin and Fondazione Gino Macaluso per l'Auto Storica in a single project.

The first fruit of this unprecedented partnership, the exhibition offers in each museum a selection of images that Rodolfo 'Rudy' Mailander took with his Leica of the 'most beautiful race in the world'. High-quality shots, exceptionally granted by the prestigious Revs Institute in Florida, bring to life a historical and cultural cross-section in which the 1000 Miglia is both protagonist and context.

Those on display are the shots that "Rudy" Mailander took from 1951 to 1954 at the 1000 Miglia, a competition that played a key role not only in the development of the automobile industry and motorsport, but also in the definition of Italian identity in the post-war period. Mailander's Leica lens thus becomes a window on a crucial passage in Italian history, allowing us to relive the rebirth of a nation's great ambitions through what had ceased to be a simple car race.

For each museum in which the shots are located, a significance is attributed: at the 1000 Miglia museum, there are images of the racing cars; at the Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile (MAUTO), it is the great personalities of the automotive world portrayed at the 1000 Miglia by Rudy; at the Museo Nicolis, the focus narrows to the Marzotto brothers: sons of a family of industrialists from Valdagno, they often participated in the 1000 Miglia in the 1950s, almost always in Ferraris; finally, at the Museo Fratelli Cozzi, Alfa Romeo is the undisputed star.