The Mille Miglia Passes Through Capannori

On Saturday, May 19th the Mille Miglia passed through Capannori. Wikipedia explains it better than I can:

"The Mille Miglia (Italian pronunciation: [ˈmille ˈmiʎʎa], Thousand Miles) was an open-road endurance race which took place in Italytwenty-four times from 1927 to 1957 (thirteen before the war, eleven from 1947).

Like the older Targa Florio and later the Carrera Panamericana, the MM made Gran Turismo (Grand Touring) sports cars like Alfa Romeo, BMW, Ferrari, Maserati and Porsche famous. The race brought out an estimated five million spectators.^[1]

Since 1977, the "Mille Miglia" has been reborn as a regularity race for classic and vintage cars. Participation is limited to cars, produced no later than 1957, which had attended (or were registered) to the original race. The route (Brescia-Rome round trip) is similar to that of the original race, maintaining the point of departure / arrival in Viale Venezia in Brescia."

The bottom line is that a lot of really classy classic cars passed through the piazza in front of our apartment.

The local car and motorbike aficionados brought their nice vehicles and parked them in front of city hall.

Before the 1927-1957 cars came through there was quite a parade of younger Ferraris and Mercedes vehicles came through.

Dom went out and took a LOT of pictures but there were over 400 cars in the 1927-1957 portion of the "race." He wore out long before all the cars came through. Here is a sampling of some of the pictures he took.

Some of the classic vehicles had a whole parade of support vehicles along with them. Some of the support vehicles were awfully nice themselves.

There was occasional passing on the turns.

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After the banner went up across the piazza we looked up the official entry list. We recognized a few names--Jay Leno and Adrian Brody. It was fun to watch and made for an interesting introduction to Capannori to our guest who arrived the same afternoon.