Targa Florio: The Impossible Road Race of the Madonie
When Alessandro Cagno wrestled his Itala across the finish line of the first Targa Florio in May 1906, he had spent more than nine hours covering three laps of a gravel circuit nearly 150 kilometres long, at an average speed below fifty kilometres per hour. The race he had just won was the invention of Vincenzo Florio, a young heir to one of Sicily's wealthiest merchant dynasties, and it would go on to outlive empires, two world wars and several entire eras of motorsport. For roughly seven decades, the Targa Florio turned the public mountain roads of the Madonie, in northern Sicily, into the most demanding endurance race on earth.
A rich man's wager in 1906
Vincenzo Florio belonged to a family whose fortune had been built on shipping, Marsala wine and tuna fisheries, and he was besotted with the automobile at a time when Sicily had barely any roads worthy of the name. In 1906 he put up a prize plaque, a targa, and invited the pioneers of European motoring to race around the Madonie mountains south-east of Palermo. The gamble paid off spectacularly. The event quickly became one of the most prestigious races in the world, drawing factory teams from Italy, France and Germany to an island most of them could only reach by ship, with their cars craned onto the docks at Palermo. Florio kept reinventing his race to keep it alive: for a few editions before the First World War it was even run around the entire coastline of Sicily, a single monstrous tour of the island that tested machinery for the better part of a day. Through wars, economic collapse and the complete transformation of the racing car, the Targa Florio kept returning to the same mountains, and by the time it finally disappeared it ranked among the oldest motor races on earth, older than both Le Mans and the Mille Miglia.
Roads never meant for racing
What made the Targa Florio unique was brutally simple: it was run on ordinary public roads. The course consisted of narrow ribbons of road clinging to hillsides, lined with stone walls, kerbs, cliff faces and unguarded drops, passing straight through the middle of mountain villages. In the early decades the surface was loose gravel and dust; later it was asphalt, but asphalt of the rough, patched, sun-baked Sicilian kind, littered in places with melted tar, gravel washed down from the slopes and the occasional wandering animal. There were no run-off areas and, for most of the race's history, no barriers of any sort. Spectators sat on walls, leaned out of windows and stood at the very edge of the road, close enough to touch the passing cars. Drivers arrived weeks before the race to learn the course in rented saloons, sharing the road with farm traffic and mule carts, because the roads stayed open to normal life until race morning. Success depended on memorising an almost endless sequence of corners, crests and surface changes, and on judging how much a mountain road that had been baking in the Sicilian sun would grip on any given afternoon.
Three circuits, one mountain range
Over its long life the race used several layouts, all drawn through the same mountains. The original Grande Circuito delle Madonie measured close to 150 kilometres per lap, and a shorter Medio circuit of roughly 108 kilometres followed. From 1932 onwards the race settled on the layout that defined it: the Piccolo Circuito delle Madonie, 72 kilometres long. From the pits and grandstands built near Cerda, a complex affectionately known as Floriopolis, the road climbed inland towards Caltavuturo, wound across the high country to Collesano, plunged downhill through endless switchbacks to Campofelice di Roccella, and finally rejoined the coast for the long Buonfornello straight, a flat stretch of several kilometres beside the sea and the only place on the entire lap where the fastest prototypes could hold maximum speed. A single lap contained several hundred corners, and even in the quickest sports prototypes of the early 1970s a lap of the Piccolo circuit took well over half an hour. No other championship venue in the world asked anything comparable of a driver's memory or concentration.
The golden age of the sports car
From 1955 to 1973 the Targa Florio counted towards the World Sportscar Championship, and its entry lists read like a history of the discipline. In 1955 Stirling Moss and Peter Collins won for Mercedes-Benz in the 300 SLR, a victory that helped seal the championship for the German marque in its extraordinary comeback season. Porsche, though, made the race its own. The company took eleven outright victories, more than any other manufacturer, beginning with Umberto Maglioli's win in 1956, and the nimble Porsche 908/3 was developed specifically with twisting venues like the Targa Florio in mind: small, light and agile where rivals were powerful but unwieldy. Alfa Romeo, whose association with the race stretched back to the pre-war years when Tazio Nuvolari won in the early 1930s, accumulated ten victories of its own, while Ferrari's final triumph came in 1972, when Arturo Merzario and Sandro Munari won with the 312 PB during Ferrari's dominant championship campaign. On roads like these, horsepower mattered far less than balance, visibility and toughness, which is why the Targa so often rewarded clever engineering over brute force.
The flying headmaster
No driver is more closely identified with the Targa Florio than Nino Vaccarella. A Palermo schoolmaster who ran a private school in the city, he was nicknamed the Preside Volante, the Flying Headmaster, and to Sicilians he was nothing less than a national hero. His name was painted in huge letters on walls and rock faces around the circuit, and villagers treated his passage as a public holiday. Vaccarella won the race three times: in 1965, sharing a Ferrari with Lorenzo Bandini; in 1971, partnering Toine Hezemans in an Alfa Romeo 33; and in 1975, alongside Arturo Merzario, after the race had lost its world championship status. What set him apart was intimate local knowledge. He had grown up with these roads and was reputed to know every crest, wall and camber change of the 72 kilometres better than any visiting professional, an advantage no amount of factory testing could replicate.
Why it had to end
By the early 1970s the contradiction at the heart of the Targa Florio had become impossible to ignore. Prototype sports cars had grown enormously fast, while the roads remained what they had always been: narrow, walled and lined with unprotected spectators. Marshalling a 72 kilometre lap properly was beyond anyone's means, and a driver who crashed on a remote mountain section might wait a long time for help. The 1973 edition was the last to count towards the World Sportscar Championship, and it was won, fittingly, not by a fragile prototype but by the rugged Porsche 911 Carrera RSR of Herbert Müller and Gijs van Lennep. Stripped of championship status, the race carried on as a national event until 1977, when a fatal accident involving spectators finally ended open-road racing in the Madonie. The famous name survived, transferred to a rally that kept the tradition alive on Sicilian roads in a different discipline.
What remains today
The extraordinary thing about the Targa Florio is that its stage still exists. The roads of the Piccolo circuit remain public highways, and anyone can drive from Cerda to Caltavuturo, Collesano and Campofelice di Roccella today, following the same route the great endurance cars once raced. Near Cerda, the old grandstands and pit buildings of Floriopolis still stand beside the road, and Collesano hosts a museum devoted to the race, filled with photographs and memorabilia donated by drivers and families from the villages along the course. Historic parades and commemorative events regularly bring classic machinery back to the mountains, and for enthusiasts the lap has become a pilgrimage, one of the few places where a lost era of motorsport can be experienced at first hand rather than merely read about.
Explore on the map
The Madonie roads are only one thread in the vast fabric of motorsport geography, but few places carry as much history per kilometre. Open the interactive map to locate Cerda, Collesano and Campofelice di Roccella, trace the outline of the old Piccolo circuit along the Sicilian coast and hills, and see how the Targa Florio's stage compares with the permanent circuits and speedways that eventually replaced races like it around the world.