Forget about Tom Cruise and Angelina Jolie, Ferrari is the star of this show. It is called “Ferrari and the Cinema,” an exhibition that opened in mid-February in the Galleria Ferrari at Maranello. And it is packed with billboards, posters, photographs and clips from over 70 films, no less, starring the blood-red masterpieces of the Prancing Horse.
The exhibition spans almost half a century and brings back memories of the vast number of films made in Hollywood and at Rome’s Cinecittà that have brought Ferrari and some of the biggest movie stars together—like Sophia Loren and her 250 GT California in Vittorio De Sica’s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and the 400 Superamerica driven by Vittorio Gassman in The Tiger. Italian actor Adolfo Celi’s character Commendatore Manetta, which was based on Enzo Ferrari, drove himself from circuit to circuit in a 330 GTC in John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix. And who can forget a blind Al Pacino’s harebrained drive through the streets of New York in a Mondial cabriolet in The Scent of a Woman or the 575 M used by Will Smith and then demolished in Bad Boys II. Then there is Eddie Murphy’s 308 GTB in Beverley Hills Cop, not to mention the Testa Rossa in which Nicolas Cage chased Sean Connery through San Francisco in The Rock.
Recently, there has been the animated feature Cars, which stars a 430 voiced by none other than Michael Schumacher.
Television is just as enamored of Ferrari, as confirmed by the long love affair Tom Selleck had with a 308 in Magnum P.I. and the Daytona GTS in Miami Vice. The exhibition continues at Galleria Ferrari (++39 0536 949713, www.galleria.ferrari.it) until June 30.
