My trip to Italy: Maranello/Ferrari, Lamborghini Factory Tour

Hey everyone... we just got back from our one week trip to Italy while we had some time off. We were going to have a longer trip with Germany and the Nurburgring preceeding the Italy portion, but a friend dropped out at the last minuted and we rescheduled everything and left Germany for a separate trip int he future. Anyway, I just thought I'd share the car related photos from the trip. I'll try not to ramble too much here as I put captions on a lot of the pics... (ingnore the couple of typos).

We started in Zurich Switzerland for a day, then took the train to Milan.

Zurich was ok, not too much in the way of cars to be seen other than a lot of the general runabouts that we don't get here really.

We didn't stay any longer in Milan other than to get off the train, walk to the Hertz place, and pick up the rental. After getting the Punto we drove to Maranello, where we stayed two nights. Maranello was awesome! Every Ferrari lover should come at least once, and any car junkie, even if you're not a Ferrari nut would probably just love the town and area in general for it's atmosphere, as everything in Maranello and the surrounding area is laid back and has a wondeful small town feel with the added bonus of a V8 or V12 soundtrack that can be heard throughout. The food was the best we had through our whole trip (save one place in Florence) and the gelato was the BEST...even better than Florence and Rome.

Everything in Maranello is pretty close together, and you can pretty much park your car and walk anywhere you need to go to to see most of the staple Ferrari related sites.

Some high points in Maranello:

- Gelato
- Restaurant next to the Hotel Domus's lobby... the pizza was super bad ass.
- Coming into town over the bridge we were greeted with an F1 car scream, and only to see who I assume was Massa doing a couple of final laps of testing prior to the Turkish GP before getting in a helicopter and leaving. (no pics)
- Seeing the F430 Scuderia testing before it was unveiled at the Frankfurt motorshow:


- Seeing a prototype testing in full camo bodywork:


After leaving Maranello, we headed to Sant'Agata for our factory tour at Lamborghini:


The factory tour at Lamborghini is awesome! Cristina Guizzardi, who sets up and gives the tour is the coolest lady you'll meet! She knows everything Lamborghini and her enthusiasm and passion for Lamborghini is obvious on talking to her. The museum is great, but some cars were missing due to the holidays. The factory wasn't in full swing as almost everyone was on holiday, so the production floor was just us more or less on tour, with only a few people putting bits and pieces onto a couple of Gallardos and Murcielagos. Very cool though to see how everything is made, and the different stations, etc. We weren't allowed to take photos on the production floor though... sorry.

After we left Sant'Agata we drove down to Florence where we started the sight seeing portion of the vacation. There are a few car moments from both Florence and Rome that I have in the gallery but not too many.

Hope you guys like them... it was a great trip and I can't wait to go back. Here's the whole gallery of photos... some shot with D2Hs, some shot on little Fuji point and shoot: There are a lot of pics...

http://www.scottandtemphotography.com/italy07cars/

 

Thanks guys, here's the second part of our trip... the photos of the other things in Italy.

We flew into Zurich straight from Dallas with no stops in about 10 hours. Once we arrived and checked into our hotel, we quickly made our way into downtown Zurich to do some sight seeing and walking. The weather was in the upper 50s and I had to be the only person there in just a t-shirt, although I didn't feel to cold really. It rained/drizzled pretty much the whole time, but we did get to see some of the city.

We saw a lot of amazing things, and ate some great food.

Highlights:

- Florence: The sculptures... I could stare at them all day long. The David ( the real one we saw was in the Academia) is breathtakingly huge, and better in person than you can imagine. The Duomo and other cathedrals were beutiful inside and out...
- Rome: the Colloseum is amazing as well... so much bigger than I imagined. The Roman forum's size, and scope were awesome! You are constantly looking up at everything. The fountains... especially the the Trevi are impressive, and the water tastes good and pure.

So many cool things... I'll let the pics do the talking.

http://www.scottandtemphotography.com/italy07sights/

one note... I loved how the Italians drove on the freeways... if you're not passing, you're not in the left lanes. I wish people did that in the U.S.

 

Awesome! You'll love it. hint: The best Gelato place is in the same little shopping area/square as the big grocery store behind the Red Passion shop.

And for the best Pizza ever go to (short drive outside of Maranello):

La Contea di Montale
via Vandello 100, Montale (MO) 059.531212
http://www.laconteadimontale.it/

 

they ARE raised... I'll have to look at all of my photos, as I edited out a bunch, and see if I have another angle of that car to see...

There's also some weird red color on the bumper near the front lip...