Museo Casa Enzo Ferrari

About this place

The Museo Casa Enzo Ferrari sits on the site of Enzo Ferrari's father's mechanical workshop in Modena, where Ferrari himself was born in 1898, and incorporates the original brick house as a small historical wing alongside a dramatically different new structure. Designed by Czech-British architect Jan Kaplický of Future Systems — better known for Prague's 'Dancing House'-era work and London's Selfridges — the museum was completed in 2012 by Shiro Studio under Andrea Morgante after Kaplický's death in 2008. The new building's defining gesture is its roof: a single continuous, swooping yellow aluminium shell that rises and curves like an oversized car bonnet or engine cover, immediately legible as automotive in character even before you know whose museum it is. Beneath the shell, a column-free exhibition hall displays historic and contemporary Ferrari and Maserati vehicles on a gently sloped floor, lit by daylight filtering through a glazed base where the yellow shell meets the ground. The pairing of Enzo Ferrari's modest brick birthplace with Kaplický's futuristic yellow form is deliberate: past and present, craftsman's workshop and industrial spectacle, sitting directly against one another on the same small site. For anyone interested in either automotive history or late-career Kaplický (his last realized building), it's one of the more surprising architectural stops in Emilia-Romagna's 'Motor Valley.'