A Car Life, by Larry Crane

Entry not required.

Bob Tullius and I were pushing the D-type slowly toward the starting ramp. Light, misty rain had been continuous since nightfall. The umbrella covered the driver’s seat but Mark Miller’s navigator perch was slowly becoming a leather-lined puddle. The C-type half of the Jaguar team was already off on its soggy adventure with the early cars.

Tracy and I were simply having an Italian holiday that included the Mille Miglia. We found David E. Davis Jr. and wife Jeanie in the registration line with Mike Dale and Mark Miller of Jaguar U.S. and legendary chief of SCCA Group 44, Bob Tullius. Bob was to share in the works D-type with Mark (then head of Jaguar public relations for North America) and Mike and DavidE were entered in a C-type form the Jag works collection. I had been an entrant two years earlier and was asked to help four guys who could do anything find their way along the registration and tech inspection line then up Via Verdi to Piazza della Loggia where the cars were displayed.

There is an entrants-only buffet at the Mille Miglia Museum before the start, but we met the team in the line along the glistening Viale Venezia. Our umbrella became the roof of the D-type.

Once they were on their way Tracy and I retired to the Park Hotel on the north edge of the Brescia. I have chased the Mille Miglia several times and typically got up early the morning after the start to see the cars off on their second day from a wooded park in Verona, then run down the Adriatic coast with the group. Not this time. We made a late launch and went directly to Gubbio in highlands on the eastern edge of Umbria, “The Green Heart of Italy”.

The event had to make a slow and painfully overheated climb into San Marino en route south, so we had time to beat them to on of my favorite towns. I have stayed in the Albergo Bosone Palace several times. It is just a couple of doors along the Via XX Settembre, at number 22. It is an urban palace, built for the Raffaelli family in the 14th century and counted Dante and Petrarca among its first guests.

Gubbio is a hill town with an enormous retaining wall that includes the back wall of the hotel. If you can book a room on that wall you can see all of Umbria and, if you squint, you can see the hazy highlands of Tuscany across the plain. We met the cars on the ascent into town then settled in for the evening. There is a narrow stair-stepped walkway down the southern side of the hotel that Ts into Via Fabri. At that intersection is a small basement ristorante where the local specialty is served; a lovely steak complete buried in thinly-sliced white truffles.

While the lads were completing a couple of hours sleep in Rome and heading north, we arranged an early breakfast and headed south to Assisi then west to Siena. Assisi, of course is famous for its Basilica San Francesco that hangs on the peak of a small mountain and anchors the old village and its still-in-tact surrounding wall. A small coffee bar on the street helps complete the morning and we set off west around Lago Tresimeno, made famous by Frances Mayes in “Under the Tuscan Sun” about finding and restoring her villa just up the valley in Cortona.

Piazza del Campo is the heart of Siena—I have been there enough to call it my spiritual hometown. The piazza is a great, shallow cone of red brick, surrounded by cafes and coffee bars and always busy with people of all ages just enjoying a Tuscan life. It is a great place to sit in a cafe overlooking the piazza to wait for the Mille Miglia to arrive. The first cars enter the piazza just after noon. Twice each summer the edge of Piazza del Campo is packed with local dirt for the Palio, Siena’s famous bare-back horse race. It was first documented in 1310 and has been Siena’s official festival since that time. The Mille Miglia enters the piazza and creeps slowly down the cone to the city hall for its checkpoint, then climbs back up the opposite side and heads north to Bologna. We join the fun on the run north. While the entries make their way through the renaissance heart of Bologna we continue back to Brescia to enjoy the afternoon and prepare to photograph the finish.

Team Jaguar arrives after 1:00 a.m. and we assemble in the Hotel Vittoria. The bar closed at midnight so the hotel gives us a basement meeting room and opens the kitchen and wine cellar for us. Great wine and exhausted minds create a havoc of hysteria. Many stories about the recent circumnavigation of the top half of Italy develop into other lively adventures and end with flying stories. Both Tullius and MikeDale own and fly Stearman bi-planes. They make the annual pilgrimage to the Stearman rendezvous in the Midwest and Mike tells the final story about trying to make the meet through a torrential rain with the ceiling slowly making its way to treetop level. The two open-cockpit planes try to stay within sight of each other and are challenged by a serious a head wind. The punch line has them both at a near standstill of ground speed and Mike remembers, “We could see LEAVES.” After which the room exploded in laughter before we all struggled off to Gualtiero Marchesi’s elegant ristorante-with-rooms villa on Lago Iseo.

No entry? No worry. Go enjoy the Mille Miglia Storica nearly as much as your pals with the cars. They get no sleep, drive too fast for too long and share a car with a friend with whom they can barely speak by the end of the event. You can enjoy Italy, see more of the same towns, eat and drink better and remember your visit.