Monday 18.04.2011 - We left our hotel, the Locanda Del Mulino

at about 8.30 am for the 40 km ride to Bologna for today was supposed to be the visit to the Ducati Factory & Museum - but we were guzzumped. No vacancies for either so it was come back the next day. All was not lost however, as the P-D needed a nice cool drink of new oil (olio) and a filter so we headed to the local Bologna Ducati dealer where we met Andrea STIVANI

who kindly helped us out by calling their service centre, about 400 metres away, and getting us shunted up the list so that we only had to wait 1.5 hours whilst the job was done. A big thank you to Andrea!

After reclaiming the now sated P-D, we mounted up and returned to Maranello where we visited Ferrari Galleria (read museum).

Ferrari does not have factory tours,

so we fantasised about which model we would buy if we won 'the big one.'


They were offering 10 minute drives of a Ferrari for 50 Euro, but we decided to keep our money as we came to the decision that as desirable as they were, we probably wouldn't buy one even if we could afford it.

Maranello is a small town of about 5 to 10 thousand people and is very beautiful, clean and well maintained.

It seems to be 'upper middle class' and clearly lives off the Ferrari name. Enzo FERRARI relocated his factory from Bologna to Maranello in 1943 during WW2 to avoid Allied bombing of his factories. He chose Maranello to relocate as he reasoned no one would think to find a factory producing war time goods out in the burbs. After the War, the factory remained and has almost been entirely rebuilt during the last decade. It provides employment to roughly 1000 locals and the flow on to other businesses must be of imeasurable value to them.

After the visit to Galleria Ferrari we went back to our hotel, had a fine meal in the in-house restaurant and hit the hay dreaming of whether to order a red one or a yellow one...