Umberto Panini with rounds of formaggio parmigiano.
A dairy in the cheese-making outskirts of Modena, Italy, hides a building not often found on a farm: a museum wearing a plaque inscribed Collezione Umberto Panini. The collection inside contains no tractors, milkers, or even machines for making formaggio parmigiano. Instead, it holds one of the world's best Maserati collections.
When David Gooley and I went looking for Umberto, we found his son Matteo. Both Paninis are Maserati fans, but Umberto's story goes back to the company's earlier days. Umberto was chief of Maserati's motorcycle department in the fifties, but when hard times hit after the disastrous 1957 race season, like many employees, Umberto lost his job. Even though he loved his hometown of Modena, he decided to pull up stakes entirely and move to Venezuela. He established a successful Italian car repair business-possibly the first in that country-but within two years, his father wrote to him and begged him to come home. "Life would be easy here now, my grandfather wrote," Matteo said, "because my uncle Giuseppe had invented the sticker, and was making a very successful business here. So my father came back in 1964, and in the daytime he was chief of the sticker machines, but at night and on the weekends he started to collect motorcycles and cars. Like so many from Modena-like Ferrari and Stanguellini-cars are somehow in our blood. Almost every afternoon at 2 o'clock you could hear the engine of a Maserati or a Ferrari being tested, or another car nearby. Maybe you don't want to, but when the world around you sings with the same voice every day, you get to like the music."
The collection started with motorcycles. "People would say I have a motorcycle I don't want, you have space, why don't you take it?" Matteo explained. Umberto's own cars, like a lovely old Lancia Lambda, were the first four-wheelers. "This Lancia is too much history for me," Matteo complains. "So much history you cannot drive it anywhere. It is one of the first cars with independent front suspension, the chassis is a monocoque like a Formula One, but you can't drive it, it is too fragile, and you can't stop because it has the old brakes. I prefer drivers, and the cars I have added to the collection-the BMW 507, the Mercedes gullwing, the Ferrari-are cars that I like to drive."
The Panini's other personal cars on display include several important Alfa Romeos, a Fiat Balilla, a lilac LaSalle, a Wolseley, and even a Cadillac V8. These were accumulated while Umberto built the small farm he purchased in 1974 into a large dairy called Azienda Agricola Hombre. The bulk of the car collection, all the Maseratis, didn't come until 1996. That was the year that family patriarch Giuseppe passed away. Soon after that sad event, Maserati put its entire factory collection up for auction at Brooks. "My father said, 'If your uncle were still alive he would say to me, hey, you must buy the collection! Because the Panini family is too near to Modena, because we in Modena must keep together-the cars of Maserati must stay in Modena!' So he bought the collection, first for the memory of my uncle, second to preserve this treasure for the city of Modena, and third, because he had the money and the space."