DPTJ Script: "Enzo Ferrari: The Many Lives, Loves, and Affairs of a Racing Empire"

This year, I'm dropping full scripts for my DPTJ episodes so you can read along,

Enzo Ferrari. Merely speaking his name aloud conjures up grandiose images of a titan of motorsport: his towering presence, the dark sunglasses obscuring his eyes. He is the man behind the legendary Scuderia Ferrari, a team that has competed in every single Formula 1 season since the sport was born in 1950, and whose legacy extended back decades even before. Even today, the inimitable Enzo still casts a broad shadow over the motorsport.

We know his accomplishments as a racer, a team leader, and a constructor. We know the idiosyncratic way he ruled over the Scuderia, like a military strategist ruthlessly playing both sides of a chess board. And we also know the exceptional accolades that the team has amassed even in the wake of Ferrari's death.

But Enzo Ferrari was far from perfect. Between a tumultuous marriage, an extramarital affair that brought him his only living son, and an ever-revolving cast of girlfriends, Ferrari's love life alone could fill the pages of any autobiography — and today on “Deadly Passions, Terrible Joys,” his love life — and its impact on his company — is exactly what we're going to discuss.

Enzo Ferrari

The story of Enzo Anselmo Giuseppe Maria Ferrari begins on February 18, 1898 in Modena, Italy — though, if we're being honest, even the date of his birth is subject to controversy. That February was an icy one, and a blizzard had swept down from the Alps to greet our young Enzo. His father, Alfredo Ferrari, was unable to dig his way over to City Hall to register the birth of his second son for several days.

The Ferrari family was somewhat middle-class, with Alfredo Ferrari opting to escape his roots as a food merchant to set up his own mechanical workshop directly next to the family home. Though Enzo's elder brother Alfredo Junior — more commonly known as Dino — preferred to pursue a more formal education, the subject of our episode saw no real benefit in doing so himself. Everything he grew to love was available to him right there in his father's workshop. In his autobiography, Enzo Ferrari stated he wanted to be a worker — nothing else.

But in Brock Yates’ biography of the man who would go on to become known as L’Ingegnere, there's a fascinating paragraph describing the supposed family dynamic of the Ferraris. I think it's important to the context of our episode, so I'm going to read it almost in full.

The family unit was sacred to the Italian male of Ferrari's generation, within, of course, the rather wide latitudes defined exclusively by the man himself — who remained free to philander, spend freely, and ignore the tenets of the Church, while in turn demanding goose-stepping obedience from his children and saintly fidelity from his wife. He adored his children, and treated his wife as a basically asexual helpmate modeled on the most perfect female of all time: His mother. Mothers were worshipped, wives tolerated, and other women treated as objects of either scorn, or lust, or both.

Growing up in that environment, it's almost certain that Enzo Ferrari would have adopted a somewhat similar mindset. We'll see throughout this episode how it continually comes into play.

Enzo Ferrari may very well have never fallen in love with motorsport had it not been for a September 6, 1908 race at Circuito di Bologna. At just 10 years old, young Enzo joined his family to watch the best Italian racers of that turn-of-the-century generation battle it out on a massive 32-mile circuit composed of public roads. There, Felice Nazzaro roared his powerful Lancia across the finish line first at a then-stunning average speed of 74 miles per hour.

Our protagonist was hooked, but, for a while, motorsport was only one star in a constellation of interests that made up Ferrari's childhood. He took up sportswriting out of adoration of his local soccer team, and at 17, he was being published in Gazzetta dello Sport, the premier sporting paper in the country. He picked up a penchant for opera singing despite having a self-described tin ear, and he loved bicycles.

But things changed quickly. As Ferrari reached his teens, World War I soon engulfed Europe, including almost every Italian male of fighting age. Ferrari's elder brother, Dino, joined the Italian Air Force, almost mythically joining the ground crew whose planes were adorned with the cavallino rampante, the prancing horse, that would go on to become the Scuderia's official logo.

In early 1916, with Dino off at war, Ferrari's father died of pneumonia, and the family business went into disarray, as Enzo waited to be called to action. Months later, though, his brother also died, having likely caught the flu while serving. The following year, at 19 years old, Enzo Ferrari too was drafted — stuck doing menial labor until, three months into his service, he too caught the flu and was discharged.

Something in Ferrari's psyche changed as a result of the experience, though it's hard to say what. Enzo is prone to self-mythologizing in his own autobiographies, but at the very least, Brock Yates believes something about his wartime experiences convinced Ferrari that his future lay in automobiles. After the war, he ventured off to Turin, a manufacturing hub along the Po River, in hopes of securing a job with Fiat.

To his dismay, he was rejected. The job market in Turin was overrun by veterans looking for employment after the horrors of the war, and, all things considered, Enzo Ferrari didn't have much of a resumé to speak of. Still, the rejection came as a shock, and as Ferrari tells it, he left Fiat's offices in dismay to sit on a bench in Valentino Park.

“I was alone,” Ferrari wrote later. “My father and brother were no more. Overcome by loneliness and despair, I wept.”

Still, he was determined to find employment. He paid visits to manufacturers large and small and spent time at the bars and restaurants where a retinue of racers spent their down time. A Bolognese car dealer named Giovanni soon gave Ferrari a job buying and transporting old Army trucks, before ultimately being hired by a test driver named Ugo Sivocci to serve as his assistant at a new automaker called Construizione Meccaniche Nazionalia, or CMN. Before long, Ferrari was joining Sivocci as a riding mechanic in races and even began entering events himself.

In the early 1920s, Ferrari joined up with a relatively new automaker known as Alfa Romeo, to serve as a driver. By this point, his resumé was looking far more impressive and even recorded a “finish” in the Targa Florio. For a burgeoning automotive company, this was a great move.

It was at Alfa Romeo that Ferrari would truly find his footing. By 1923, he was a Grand Prix winner, and his list of victories even included the iconic Coppa Acerbo in Pescara. Still, even around that time, his dedication to the act of racing had waned. Ugo Sivocci, who had taken a chance on Enzo at CMN, was killed in a crash, followed by Ferrari's friend Antonio Ascari. Upon the birth of his son Dino in 1932, Ferrari retired from racing but instead took over as manager of Alfa Romeo's racing operations, helping guide iconic racers like Tazio Nuvolari and Giuseppe Campari to the top of their game. The Alfa Romeo team was named Scuderia Ferrari, and its logo became the aforementioned cavallino rampante.

The road was rocky for Ferrari, and in 1937, his Scuderia was shut down. Enzo remained as the sporting director for the newly named Alfa Corse racing division, but after a disagreement with the managing director of the operation, Ugo Gabbato, Ferrari was fired altogether in 1939.

You'll see a lot of accounts claiming that Ferrari left Alfa of his own accord, but Brock Yates states that that's not true. His dismissal came with a comfortable severance, and because he'd since gone back to living in a humble apartment in Modena, he had the money to support his young family and to found a new company named Auto-Avio Construzioni, which supplied parts to other racing teams.

Ferrari landed on his feet, but his ego would take longer to heal. Despite the fact that, at 41, he had become an impressive figure in the Italian motorsport world, and that he soon began to build two cars for the 1940 Mille Milglia, the man was hurt. He was ashamed to have been fired, and was unable to use the name Scuderia Ferrari as part of his settlement with Alfa. Other automakers began to flood into Modena to establish their roots in Ferrari's hometown. It was going to be difficult to reestablish a place of respect within the community.

And then, in 1940, World War II brought everything to a halt. Enzo Ferrari was too old at the time for military service, and, broken by his dismissal from Alfa, he soon began manufacturing machinery for the war effort. Because of that, his factory was bombed, and Ferrari was forced to relocate from Modena to Maranello.

In the swirl of war, Enzo began a liaison with another woman, who soon got pregnant. His son Dino, just 12 years old, was sick, and his already tenuous relationship with his wife grew more strained. When peace brought an end to the political chaos, Ferrari was ready to escape into the automotive and motorsport worlds once again, and he wasted no time preparing the race cars that would come to make him famous. The story of the Scuderia, though, is a story for another day.

Laura Domenica Garello

In the early 1920s, as a young Enzo Ferrari bounced between Milan and Turin selling cars and racing, he met the woman who was to become his wife: Laura Domenica Garello.

Though there was a persistent myth that Laura came from money, the truth was a much different story. Her parents were peasants, and her dialect identified her as a firm member of the rural working class. Somehow, some way, and for some reason, she and Enzo Ferrari ran into one another at the Porto Nuova train station in central Turin, and almost immediately, the fair-haired 21 year old became Enzo Ferrari's companion. Though they weren't married until 1923, Laura was being referred to as Signora Ferrari by 1922.

Why? Well, Brock Yates posits that it was a political move as much as a personal one. At the time, Enzo Ferrari was still establishing his legitimacy in the Alfa Romeo world; having a mistress or a girlfriend was considered inappropriate for a man like him, though it would have been silently accepted had he been more renowned, or more upper class. A wife was safe, offering a sense of stability that would have been critical in Ferrari's ongoing pursuit of raising his profile. It's also quite likely that he and Laura were sharing a bed more regularly than would have been appropriate for an unmarried couple, and Ferrari was attempting to spare his mother's feelings.

The marriage became official on April 28, 1923, in a small Catholic church in Turin. Only Laura's family and friends turned up to the ceremony, despite opposing the union. Reflecting on the day later, Ferrari took a rather ungenerous view of the whole thing.

“I married young, somewhere around 1920,” he wrote. “I cannot remember the exact year, as I have mislaid the marriage certificate.” Then, he continued writing in the third person: “This young man declared that nothing else mattered where there was love. I later came to realize that the rest did matter and matter a lot.”

And it seems like that realization came quickly. As Brock Yates writes in his biography of Ferrari, Laura largely disappeared from the racing world. Where she once was found near her beloved Enzo, no matter where in the country he was racing, she was soon expected to return home and take on the standard duties of the wife. Yates hypothesizes that it only took a few months before Ferrari was sleeping with other women.

We can't say how Laura felt about things, but we do know that by 1925, her frustrations were mounting, and as she and Ferrari planned to move out of the home they'd converted into an automotive workshop, she was engaged in a bitter battle with Ferrari's mother, Adalgisa, who apparently hated one another from the very moment they met. Making matters worse, Ferrari was absolutely devoted to his mother, who was the only remaining of his close family. A portion of his funds were set aside to support Adalgisa, who he tried to keep as far away from Laura as possible with the two still living in the same town. Ferrari, for his own part, tried to keep away from both of them, and could increasingly be found whiling away the hours in bars and cafés, wooing the flashy women that flocked to the motorsport scene.

Still, with divorce explicitly banned by the Catholic church, Laura and Enzo were bound together whether they liked it or not. The only small positive they seemed to find in a very conflicted marriage came in the form of their son, Alfredo Ferrari, known as Dino. Dino was born on January 19, 1932, and from the moment he left the womb, he was being primed to take over the ever-expanding Ferrari empire.

During the war, the Ferraris purchased land in Maranello under Laura's name, largely in the hope that doing so would help prevent any issues with the government. She remained the caretaker of the financial side of the growing Ferrari empire, even as young Dino began to fall ill with what we now assume to be Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a disease that ravages the the muscles throughout the body, until, eventually, it leaves a person bed-bound. All the while, Enzo was engaging in an affair with another woman named Lina Lardi.

For years, they maintained this façade, with Laura taking charge of the Scuderia's finances as young Dino began helping out in the shop and pursuing an education, studying economics in Bologna and mechanical engineering in Switzerland in the hopes of taking the family business to new levels — at least, until his illness forced him into bed at his family's home.

Even there, Dino aimed to leave some kind of legacy, helping Ferrari engineer Vittorio Jano sort through the details of a new 1.5-liter V6 engine. When he died on June 30, 1956, at just 24 years old, the Ferrari marriage shattered.

As you might imagine, both Laura and Enzo began pointing fingers at one another. Even though muscular dystrophy had been discovered for over a century at this point, it was highly unlikely that doctors would have known how to diagnose it. Dino's illness was referred to as leukemia, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, and the “nephritis virus,” but according to Brock Yates, Enzo Ferrari also firmly believed, at least for some period of time, that his son's death was caused by syphilis that he contracted from his mother, who he began to refer to as being a whore.

In the wake of his son's death, Enzo Ferrari became ever more stoic, cynical, and bitter. Here begins to emerge the man who never once hesitated to pit his drivers against one another, who began to express grief not for the talent that died behind the wheel of his cars, but for the broken car itself. Meanwhile, Laura is said to have become more erratic and unstable — and understandably so. Making matters even worse, she was still in the throes of grief when she discovered that her husband had been living a second life with Lina Lardi — who had given birth to Enzo's son. The new boy was named Piero, and as Yates writes, Laura “was clearly the loser. With her only son dead, Ferrari himself had seemingly hedged his bets by siring a second offspring — a second heir, as it were — who remained concealed to all but a few of Ferrari's closest associates.” Laura was irate, referring to the child as a “bastard” any time she could, and forbidding him from stepping foot in the Scuderia Ferrari workshop.

As work began on a car that would come to be known as the Tipo 156, or the “sharknose” — a race car featuring the 1.5-liter V6 engine designed in part by Dino Ferrari that would run the 1961 Formula 1 season — Laura Ferrari changed.

Suddenly, she began to appear in the workshop after years spent managing the financial affairs from home. She demanded to attend races, to be shuttled to the track, and to stop at various cathedrals and monasteries on the way. She carried a briefcase filled with cash but never paid for anything, instead walking out of shops with items and forcing others to pay on her behalf. She flew to America for the 12 Hours of Sebring.

No one knew what to make of her sudden presence, or her more active role in the racing activities of Ferrari. Yes, she and her husband remained firm business partners, even if the romance of their marriage had died out decades ago. Was Laura serving as a mole, carrying information back to her husband? Did her financial stake in the company encourage her to take a stronger stance as more and more starstruck fans began to assemble around Enzo?

We have no idea. What we do know is that, at the end of the 1961 F1 season that saw the Scuderia take a championship with Phil Hill at the Italian Grand Prix, where teammate Wolfgang von Trips collided with Jim Clark and ultimately killed himself and 15 spectators, Ferrari's most dedicated workers up and left.

Why? Well, many seemed to believe that Laura's sudden interest — and interference — in the race team resulted in a kind of “palace revolt,” though it’s likely that that was only one factor, especially because Ferrari didn't like it when his employees began to think of themselves as important and nonexpendable. Whatever the case, Laura Ferrari dropped off the map. She never again attempted to be a player in the company, instead spending as much time as she could at a family villa on the Adriatic coast.

As she reached her 70s, she began to grow even more erratic, given to petty theft and, allegedly, even demanded women on the street give her their dresses. She and Enzo Ferrari still lived together, albeit in separate rooms of a home that had been growing increasingly shabby, and as she aged, she spent more and more time in bed, suffering from some kind of “dystrophy of the legs.” According to the rumor mill of Modena, Laura even attempted suicide by jumping in the Panaro River at this time. Several Ferrari mechanics are said to have saved her life, only for Enzo to reprimand them. “If she ever jumps in again,” he said, “leave her in there.”

On January 27, 1978, Laura Ferrari died, after 55 years of marriage to Enzo Ferrari. There is no official reason given for the cause of her death. Nevertheless, she was interred in the family mausoleum, albeit separated from her son, Dino.

In the years after her death, Enzo Ferrari recognized Piero Lardi as his son, endowing him with the coveted Ferrari surname. Piero's young family, as well as his mother Lina, were ultimately invited to live with Enzo Ferrari, for the first time receiving public recognition for their relationship with Il Commendatore.

Lina Lardi delgi Aleardi

As World War II raged on into its final years, and as Ferrari's various operations were targeted by Allied bombing raids, Enzo Ferrari discovered that he was going to be a father once again.

As Italian men were shipped off to the front lines, local women were recruited to work for companies like Ferrari, taking over the art of wartime production. One such woman — fair-haired and beautiful by all accounts — quickly caught her boss’ eye. Her name? Lina Lardi delgi Aleardi. Some reports claim that she first encountered her in 1929 or 1930, when Lina was just 19 years old, but renewed their relationship with a vigor during the war.

At the time, Enzo Ferrari was in his mid-40s, over a decade older than the gentle woman from Castelvetro who caught his eye. We know so little about Lina's background, but we do know that, on May 22, 1945, she gave birth to Enzo Ferrari's second son, named Piero Lardi.

We don't know where Ferrari's head was at during this time, but it certainly couldn't have been anywhere good. His business was in shambles. His marriage was falling apart. His first son, Dino, had fallen ill. And in the middle of all of this came a second son — one who, from all appearances, was much healthier than the first.

We do know, however, that Enzo Ferrari seemed to find comfort in this second family — though, due to the nature of the relationship, he kept the details under wraps for much of his life. He found solace in Castelvetro, which seemed to become a quieter haven than his chaotic life back in Maranello.

Per Brock Yates, when Ferrari instructed his driver to whisk him away to Castelvetro, “his entire persona would soften. His posturing, his gruffness, and his explosive temper would disappear once inside the shuttered little home, and he would tolerate from the rambunctious child all manner of teasing and ridiculous horseplay. This shedding of pretense was not unusual for an important man around his mistress, but for a man like Ferrari, who was developing an overblown, magisterial aloofness in public, the reversion to the ways of an old padrone was a shocking transformation.”

There, he was no longer Enzo Ferrari, head of a burgeoning race team and manipulator of men. He didn't have to worry about business or finances or race results or the production of a new car. He didn't have to worry about the health of his son, or the emotions of his son's mother. He could soften, relax.

While it's not my place to condemn or condone Ferrari for his actions, I do want to note that it wasn't as if he totally emotionally abandoned Dino Ferrari — though I don't think the same could be said for Laura. When he was at home, Enzo claimed that he pored over medical literature trying to find a cure for his son. He religiously tracked Dino's food and fluid intake, correlating it to his son's health.

(However, I do also want to note here that other people disagree with Ferrari's sentiment that he was a devoted and doting father. Carroll Shelby had become close friends with Dino as the boy neared his death, spending hours at his bedside. Shelby claimed Ferrari was nowhere to be found.)

The truth, as with the truth of most things, likely falls somewhere in the middle. But that being said, no matter how involved Ferrari was in Dino's life, he very likely craved a life where things were different — where his son was healthy, and where the weight of the world didn't press so heavily on his shoulders.

As Piero grew older, Enzo began to take him more under his wing. He invited Lina and Piero to move into apartments in Maranello, and brought Piero to the factory to serve first as an English translator and later to take a more active role in the day-to-day runnings of the factory — much to Laura's disdain. After Laura died, Piero and Lina moved into Ferrari's large apartment, and Piero was finally invited to take on the Ferrari surname. She and her son were present at Enzo Ferrari's bedside when he passed away in 1988.

Lina Lardi remained quiet and dutiful throughout her life, keeping the intimate details of her relationship close to her chest and out of the prying eyes of the public. Though her family initially disapproved of her role as his mistress, they soon softened; Ferrari was, after all, no mere man.

Even though she played a massive role in Ferrari's life and went on to live until 2006, we still don't know much about her — and I'm sure she was likely inundated with requests to dish out all the details of her decades-long affair. Rather than speak to the tabloids or write a memoir, Lina Lardi remained quiet and faithful until the end. According to Brenda Vernor, who served as Ferrari's secretary during the last decade of his life, Lina never went on to marry, and the details of her life will likely remain concealed.

Fiamma Breschi

Fiamma Breschi didn't intend to become one of Enzo Ferrari's retinue. In fact, when she met him, she was dating one of his drivers.

But before we begin that particular saga, let me back up ever so slightly. In the late 1950s, Scuderia Ferrari was absolutely unstoppable — both because of the quality of its race cars, but also thanks to the shrewdness with which Enzo Ferrari selected his driver line-up. Il Commendatore seemed to have an almost supernatural ability to sniff out drivers who were not only quick but who also possessed some kind of character flaw that Ferrari could exploit. For example, Ferrari found a lot of success with American racer Phil Hill, not so much because he gave Hill a comfortable atmosphere in which to thrive, but because he exacerbated Hill's rampant anxiety.

Many people have said that Ferrari wasn't so much an engineer or team manager so much as he was an incredible manipulator of men. That manipulation served as the backbone of his racing operations, and in 1958, the Scuderia's full-time Grand Prix team consisted of three men: Peter Collins, Mike Hawthorn, and Luigi Musso.

Hawthorn and Collins were two of Britain's brightest racing talents, but beyond that, they quickly established an incredible bond. At the Ferrari race shop, they were the only two men who spoke English as a first language, and before long, they were inseparable — and they were both also close to one Enzo Ferrari.

This absolutely rankled their teammate Luigi Musso. Born in Rome, Musso was hailed as Italy's next great hope in the racing world. He'd put in a few years with Maserati before making the move to Ferrari, where he naturally might have expected to become the team's number one driver.

But at Ferrari, that was an honor to be earned, not handed out lightly. As Musso soon discovered, Ferrari wanted him to fight for role in the team — and to fight hard.

That realization weighed heavily on Musso's shoulders, and it seemed as though Hawthorn and Collins realized that; they could get away with cajoling Musso into erratic behavior both on and off the track, even allegedly going so far as telling him after 1958's 24 Hours of Le Mans that the two Brits could conspire together to guarantee that Ferrari's next champion would be British, not Italian.

Making matters worse for Musso was his private life. In the midst of his racing career, he abandoned his wife and children, instead pursuing a fiery 24-year-old named Fiamma Breschi. He lived larger than his means and soon found himself in a truly drastic amount of debt. According to Ferrari's sporting director Romolo Tavoni, Musso received a letter from his estranged wife the night before the French Grand Prix instructing him that he needed to win in order to pay off his debts.

As if that tension wasn't enough, Peter Collins also discovered that he'd been demoted to Formula 1 ahead of the French race at Reims — punishment not only for losing the 24 Hours of Le Mans thanks to a clutch failure, but for abandoning the car on the side of the track and shipping off immediately. It was an embarrassment for Ferrari. Naturally, he punished Collins.

But Collins fought back; if he finished well in the F2 race, he argued, he should be allowed to start in Formula 1. Coming second, he earned his slot — thus kicking off a heated battle with Musso. After all, Hawthorn and Collins perhaps wondered if Musso had ratted them out to Enzo Ferrari for threatening to conspire against him.

At the start of the race, Hawthorn launched into the lead ahead of Luigi Musso, the latter of whom began a desperate chase to snatch the position from Hawthorn. To do so, he attempted to take the tricky Muizon curve flat-out — and got it wrong. His Ferrari jumped a curb and somersaulted three times, throwing Musso to the ground.

In the pits was Musso's young girlfriend, Fiamma Breschi, who was assisting in the timing and scoring. She waited for his car to streak past her, but it didn't happen. Lap after lap went by, and Musso didn't show.

“No one said a word and I was scared to ask,” she recalled in her memoir. “I started to pray, ‘please god, please god.’”

Shockingly, Musso was still alive when he was fetched by a medical helicopter and whisked to the Maison Blanche hospital in Reims. According to Breschi, he didn't have a scratch on him. She was heartened enough to head back to her hotel room to wait for news — only to discover soon after that Musso had died.

“I ran for the window, which was open because it was July and very hot,” she later said. “I tried to throw myself out. I was already halfway out when Beba (Fangio’s girlfriend) and Lulu Trintignant (Maurice Trintignant’s wife) grabbed me and pulled me back. They didn’t leave me alone that night or the next day.”

According to Michael Cannell in his book The Limit, Breschi looked out the window at one point that evening to spot Musso's mortal enemies Mike Hawthorn and Peter Collins kicking an empty can in a piazza.

“For a brief moment, the hate for those two was stronger than the pain I was feeling,” she recalled. “I would have wanted them dead. Why were they alive and Luigi was not? Damned Englishmen. Why were they laughing?”

And things only got worse. Divorce was forbidden in Italian Catholic law, which meant Musso was still married to his wife. Breschi was not only ineligible for any inheritance, but Musso’s wife soon turned up at her house to retrieve any jewelry her husband had gifted to Breschi — going so far as to even attempt to tear it off the other woman's body.

A month after Musso’s funeral, Breschi found a letter from Enzo Ferrari in her mailbox, stating that she'd always have friends in Maranello.

By the time she took a train to Modena in the summer of 1959, both Collins and Hawthorn had died — the first in a crash at the German Grand Prix, the second in a road accident after retiring from F1 as World Champion. The complexion of the team had changed entirely, but Breschi's grief was only made worse by the recent suicide of her grandmother.

When she arrived in Maranello, she and Ferrari wept together: She, for her lover and grandmother, he for the loss of his son.

Recalling this date in her autobiography, Breschi wrote that Ferrari “was a constructor of cars and a destroyer of souls; and yet, if you entered into his orbit, you would have given anything to never leave. That is how I entered into his life and he into mine.”

Not long after, Ferrari had helped Breschi establish her own boutiques in Bologna and Florence, and he paid her a visit at her apartment weekly on Thursday afternoons. Soon after, he recruited her to head to the race tracks because he was apparently dissatisfied with the reports he was getting from his drivers and mechanics.

“He wanted news firsthand, not only expert opinions,” Breschi explained. “I lent myself to this work, I know the atmosphere well, and I knew how to distinguish a champion from a good driver.”

In a different interview Breschi continued, “I always had to know what was going on. Then I'd go back to Modena and report it to him in person. Sometimes he got contradictory reports and he'd say, 'Should I believe you or them?'"

The true nature of the relationship between Breschi and Ferrari remained shrouded in mystery for decades until, in the early 2000s, dedicated journalists were able to track her down.

In 2004, Breschi spoke candidly to The Guardian about her relationship with Ferrari, where she claimed that, though she was close to him, she kept the affair entirely platonic.

"He started to desire me,” she said. “At first he hinted at it, and later he made it very clear. It started with letters and then moved to telephone conversations which lasted up to two hours. He would call me when the engineers went to lunch, after they went home, any time he had a minute to spare. He told me that he couldn't imagine his life without me. I refused him, but he kept writing to me about a passion that he said was literally consuming him. This lasted for years."

"According to his letters," Breschi says, "I was the first woman of his life. His relationship with his wife was very odd. She was very funny when she was young, but after their son's death they became estranged. He saw her as a burden. With the other one, he always said it was an accident. Signora Lina never made his life difficult. When she was unhappy, she would go shopping in Modena. Her other hobby was knitting, and with that she managed to be content. We are all different. My hobby was driving a Ferrari."

In a later conversation with La Nazione, Breschi said that she was merely a “companion,” but not in a romantic sense. She explained that she was still in love with Luigi Musso, even decades after his death, but that she and Enzo Ferrari were constant companions, spending as much as four hours each day chatting to one another on the phone.

“After Luigi's death, he approached me with kind words,” she explained in that interview. “I wanted to die, too, there's no point in hiding it. But Ferrari wrote to me to go and see him, he told me to eat and keep myself up. To take long walks in the countryside. He encouraged me to live.”

According to Breschi, their relationship was close enough that she was able to influence Enzo Ferrari's personal style and even consulted with her about driver hirings and car design. While there are reports that Enzo bought bars and restaurants for some of his other flings, Breschi firmly denied that their relationship was ever anything but platonic. They were, simply, two people who perhaps understood one another more than anyone else in the world. She said that they remained in contact up until the day Enzo Ferrari died.

On November 21, 2015, Fiamma Breschi died in her hometown of Florence, Italy.

Why does any of this matter today?

In 2025, our contemporary understanding of relationships have drastically evolved when compared to Enzo Ferrari's liaisons back in his day. While extramarital affairs and having children out of wedlock may not be accepted, I can guarantee you know someone who has publicly discussed the actions of a cheating spouse. Even now, though, there's still this sense of, “why does it matter?” This is someone's personal life, after all. Is it really any of our business?

And maybe that's still the case for the Average Joe. If your buddy Steve from accounting is still doing his job well, does anyone else in the office really need to know about the issues he and his wife are facing at home? No, probably not.

But Enzo Ferrari wasn't just any man. He was a monolith. An icon. Whether he was signing the next greatest Formula 1 star or arguing with the FIA about what constitutes homologation in sports car racing, he was the kind of person whose very presence brings with it a sense of gravitas. When you have the Vatican writing articles about you, then I think it's fair to say you're not just the average Joe.

Even more than that, though, was the fact that Enzo Ferrari was his company. He was his race team. He lived and breathed his work. His race shop was his home, his favorite restaurant was the place where he entertained drivers and sponsors, and he rarely traveled outside of his hometown, where he also built an incredible business. And that meant his extramarital affairs took on a sheen of extra importance.

And that includes actual, factual importance — such as the matter of inheritance. After Ferrari and his wife Laura witnessed the death of their beloved son Dino, there was no one left to inherit the company. No one, that is, except for his second son, Piero.

We know Piero was born out of wedlock. We know Enzo Ferrari had to wait until Laura's death to officially recognize the boy as his son. But at that point, Piero Lardi Ferrari became the future of the company, and is now vice chairman with a 10% stake in it. Did Ferrari's affair with Lina Lardi matter? Well, yes: It was ultimately their son who carried on the Ferrari family name.

Did it matter that Enzo Ferrari was regularly unfaithful to both Laura and Lina? Yes, of course. We may not know all the details of his every liaison, but knowing that he was a big fan of the whole “sexual conquest” thing helps us understand his legacy, his actions, and who he was at his core. You can take whatever moral stance you like about his infidelity, but knowing that Enzo Ferrari regularly sought out sex paints a picture of a man who was driven first and foremost by gratifying his ego. In the context of his legacy as a team owner, it certainly helps us greater understand why he could be so hard on his drivers, signing them and firing them at a whim, or pushing them to the very brink. We're looking at a guy who saw most of the people in his life as pawns in service to his success, his pleasure, and, ultimately, his legacy.

But I think knowing all of this about Ferrari can also show us a depth of personality we'd likely never understand otherwise. Particularly, I'm thinking of Fiamma Breschi here, Luigi Musso's mistress who became Ferrari's lover after Musso's death. She was devastated by Musso's death, and Ferrari actively reached out to her as she mourned. Sure, maybe he was just gunning for sex, but the two developed a bond: Breschi serving as Ferrari's spy and confidant, and Ferrari helping her set up a series of boutiques as a means of maintaining her living.

She was described as becoming the woman who ultimately understood Ferrari better than any of the other women with whom he had affairs. She understood cars and demanded very little of Ferrari, but perhaps most critically, the two both deeply understood what it was like to be destroyed by grief and yet still have to wake up every morning in search of a purpose. Further, Breschi was similar to Ferrari in the way she fiercely protected her independence. In 2004, she told The Guardian that she rejected marriage proposals from Ferrari because “Enzo was a man who wanted everything, and I wanted no one. I wanted to defend my freedom at any cost.” Even if he'd been hurt at her rejections, Ferrari certainly would have respected Breschi's reasoning.

So, yes, I'd argue that the broad strokes of Enzo Ferrari's love life are of actual historical importance. I don't think we need to know the finer details of his tomfoolery, but I do firmly believe that Ferrari's professional legacy cannot be separated from his personal life, not when they're one and the same.

Bibliography

• Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races by Brock Yates

• Enzo Ferrari: Power, Politics, and the Making of an Automotive Empire by Luca dal Monte

• The Limit: Life and Death on the Grand Prix Circuit by Michael Cannell

• Motor Sport Magazine, “Laura Ferrari: The driving force behind Enzo's empire”

• Motor Sport Magazine, “Enzo Ferrari's right-hand woman”

• The Guardian, “Mistress of the maestro of Maranello”

• Think Design Magazine, “Fiamma Breschi, The First Lady of Formula One Talks About Enzo Ferrari”

• La Nazione, “La donna che creò anima e stile del Cavallino”