Men do not make history; they endure it, as they endure geography. And history, anyhow, is all a matter of geography.

Giovanni Guareschi, The Little World of Don Camillo

Even when he was at the height of his fame and fortune, his name heard around the world, granting or denying audiences to Hollywood stars and names from the Alamanach de Gotha, his mother could sometimes be heard to say, 'Ah, but the better of my sons is dead.'

Who knows what effect such words might have had on the survivor, a boy with strange hooded eyes, and what seeds of a tendency towards the sardonic and the dismissive they may have implanted? At any rate she was, so his friends and acquaintances said, the only person, man or woman, of whom Enzo Anselmo Ferrari was ever frightened. 'Enzo, Enzo!' she would shout. The reply from the grown man was instant. 'Yes, Mother?'

Adalgisa Bisbini came to Modena from her family home in Forli, sixty kilometres along the via Emilia towards Rimini, to marry Alfredo Ferrari. Born in 1859, the elder of the couple by thirteen years, Alfredo was a grocer's son from Carpi, a few kilometres north. Both were from modestly prosperous petit-bourgeois families. Alfredo, who had been a supervisor at the Rizzi metalworks, started his own business in Modena, fabricating metal parts. His workshops, and the family house, were sited at 264 via Camurri, next to the railway line running through the northern end of the town; the national railway system became his biggest client. The buildings stand there today, now renamed and renumbered but looking almost exactly as they did then, except for the television aerials sprouting from the roof of the two-storey house. From the road, the house appears deserted, the long, low workshops disused. But round the side, where the railway track passes along the front, up there on the brickwork of the upper floor of the house, the name FERRARI can just be seen, carefully lettered in white paint that may be only a decade or two from fading completely.

Alfredo and Adalgisa Ferrari had two sons. The first, also called Alfredo, was born in 1896, followed two years later by Enzo. The younger son's birth certificate indicates that he was born on 20 February 1898; in fact his appearance in the world had come two days earlier, coinciding with the arrival of a snowstorm so heavy that it prevented his father from travelling to the registry office to report the birth until two days later.

In those days, Modena had a population of about sixty thousand. Originally the base of a wandering tribe of Celts called the Boii, it was captured in 218 bc by the Romans, who named it Mutina. It became a station on the via Emilia, the road from Ariminum (Rimini) to Mediolanum (Milan) laid down in 187 bc by Marcus Aemilius Lapidus, and the centre of a region in which retired legionaries settled on land given them after twenty-five years' service to the state. It was also where Spartacus and his rebel army of escaped gladiators and slaves faced two legions under Gaius Cassius in 72 bc. Although wearied by a long march from Meta Ponte on the sole of the Italian mainland, Spartacus's band slaughtered their opponents almost to a man before heading away on a journey into the Alps, which was to end in their own destruction. Thirty years later, Mutina was where Mark Antony finally caught and captured one of the nobles who had conspired in the assassination of Julius Caesar. After passing through the hands of various invading barbarians, Modena settled down again and developed into a thriving regional centre. The Cathedral of San Geminiano, begun in 1099 by the architect Lanfranco and decorated with friezes and gargoyles by the sculptor Wiligelmo, is one of the glories of Renaissance Italy. In the seventeenth century the town joined the Lombard League and benefited from the commercial activities of the Este family, whose influence radiated throughout the regions of Emilia and Romagna. When they were ejected from their base in a magnificent palace in Ferrara, Modena became their new headquarters. Their Palazzo Ducale, built in 1634, later became a military academy whose students, in their striking fuschia-coloured uniforms, were the country's military leaders in the making. In 1673 Maria Beatrice D'Este, known as Maria of Modena, left Italy to marry James, Duke of York, the future James II of England. Modena's sons included the great eighteenth-century historian Lodovico Antonio Muratori, author of the vast Annali d'Italia, the composers Marco Uccellini and Alessandro Stradella, the poet Fulvio Testi and the pioneering gynaecologist Gabriele Falloppia. There was also the hat manufacturer and ardent nationalist Ciro Menotti, who one night in 1831 was supposed to rise from his seat in the Teatro Ducale and interrupt an opera festival by offering the crown of a united Italy to the Duke of Modena. Instead he was arrested at his home in the Corso Canalgrande and later executed.

It is the sort of city the English writer Jonathan Keates describes as 'perfect north Italy, the small, accessible metropolis, with enough air to breathe and a sufficient veneer of worldliness, in which you might live without annoyance'. Not always enough air to breathe, however. Its climate veers between suffocating heat and winter fogs; the Romans had to drain swamps in order to make it habitable. By the time Enzo Ferrari came into the world it was also noted for a sparkling red wine called Lambrusco, for many varieties of aceto balsamico, or balsamic vinegar, for a dish of pigs' trotters known as zampone, for the pervasiveness of tortellini in brodo, and for countless small workshops in which men hammered and cut and twisted and produced almost anything that could be made in metal. The origins of this particular regional speciality are obscure, but the men of Modena and the surrounding small towns earned a reputation for craft skills and ingenuity in the manufacture of the sort of thing - axles, cart springs, bodywork - that made the transfer from the age of the horse and cart to the era of the automobile. And these were the men, around thirty of them employed by his father, among whom Enzo Ferrari grew up.

He later wrote that he and his brother shared a bedroom over the workshop; thanks to an absence of heating and curtains, it never got warm in the winter. 'We were awakened in the morning by the ringing of hammers. My father . . . acted as the manager, the designer, the salesman and the typist of his firm all at the same time.' But he was successful enough to buy three-speed bicycles for his sons, and there was enough room for the boys to keep homing-pigeons in a loft in one of the workshops. The modest but handsome four-room house, after all, had a pink marble staircase - 'the only luxury'. Enzo remembered his father as a man dedicated to his business but with time for culture, and for music in particular. Alfredo senior had played the cello, and there was a piano in the house. He was also a fastidious man, drafting his correspondence on the backs of envelopes before typing a final version on a Royal typewriter, keeping copies made in violet ink on a small duplicating machine. Those copies left a lasting impression on his younger son, who used violet ink in his fountain pen for the rest of his life.

Alfredo junior, known as Dino, was a good scholar, quiet and studious. Enzo, however, disliked school. He would rather be out riding his bike, rollerskating, running foot-races on a hundred-metre course marked out in front of the workshops, shooting rats, or entering his pigeons in competitions. His boyhood ambitions, he wrote, were to be 'an opera singer, a sports writer, and lastly a racing driver', vocations not dependent on academic qualifications.

The desire to be a racing driver had its roots in his father's acquisition, in 1903, of a motor car, one of only twenty-seven in Modena. It was a single-cylinder De Dion Bouton, of French manufacture, and the family acquired a combined chauffeur and handyman to keep it in good fettle. Other cars followed the De Dion, and one of them carried the two Ferrari boys, dressed in identical sailor suits, to their first communion, at which Enzo was presented with a silver watch by his godfather, Anselmo Chiarli, in whose honour he had been given his middle name.

On 6 September 1908, Alfredo Ferrari took his sons to see their first motor race. The Circuito di Bologna was a star-studded event featuring two of the greatest drivers of the day, the tall, blue-eyed Felice Nazzaro of Turin, twenty-seven years old, and Vincenzo Lancia, a Piedmontese, a year younger, racing their giant Fiats over a fifty-kilometre course formed from public roads on the city's outskirts, incorporating part of the via Emilia. Lancia made the fastest lap but Nazzaro won the race, at an average of 74 mph over the fast, straight roads.

Naturally, the young Enzo was entranced by the spectacle of motor racing in its infancy. The two Fiats were painted red; a year earlier, for the French Grand Prix at Dieppe, new regulations required entrants to paint their cars in their national colours - blue for France, white for Germany, green for Britain, red for Italy. The identities of those members of the governing body who determined the match of countries and colours are lost to historians, as are the reasons behind their decisions. But it may reasonably be assumed that the French, being the principal organisers of early motor racing, gave themselves the first choice, and took the blue with which their country is identified. It seems likely that the association of red with Italy came about through the popularity of Garibaldi, the nineteenth-century leader of the nationalist movement, whose soldiers were famous for their red shirts. The dramatic appearance of the cars of Nazzaro and Lancia must have made an impression on the small boy. But in his later recollections Enzo Ferrari remarked that he was also struck by a novel safety feature: at the most dangerous bend, where the crowd was thickest, the spectators were separated from the track by a strip of land forty yards wide which had been flooded with water.

A year later he was back for more, a spectator at the time trial over a measured mile on the straight stretch of the road at Navicello, between Modena and Ferrara, organised by the fledgling Modena Automobile Association. He walked two miles from his home, crossing three fields and a railway line, to watch the event, in which some of the better-known Italian drivers of the time took part. Attendants with water barrels damped down the unmade surface before each competitor set off. The event was won by a driver called Da Zara, who recorded an average of 87 mph. 'I found these events immensely exciting,' Ferrari reported.

More exciting, certainly, than his studies. Enzo recalled an August night in his fifteenth year when he was walking along with his friend, a boy named Peppino, and was using a car magazine to swat away the mosquitoes. Suddenly Peppino asked him what he was going to do when he grew up. Under the flickering light of the gas street lamps, Enzo pointed to a picture of Ralph De Palma, the winner of the Indianapolis 500. 'I will be a racing driver,' he said. 'Good,' Peppino answered. 'If you succeed, that will be a good profession.'

Enzo and Alfredo practised writing their signatures in the ice that formed on their bedroom window, looking ahead to the day when they would be famous men, pursued for their autographs. Alfredo did not allow the fantasy to distract him. When Enzo came home with a bad school report, however, his father beat him. 'I can still remember the weight of his hand,' he wrote more than half a century later. 'He said, "You must become an engineer!"' There is no record of his father's reaction when, in 1914, the sixteen-year-old Enzo became a published writer, contributing the first of several football reports to La Gazzetta dello Sport, Italy's celebrated national sports daily newspaper. One of them described the 7-1 defeat of his home-town team at the hands of Internazionale, the team of stars who had only recently broken away from their parent club AC Milan.

In 1915 Italy entered the Great War, and Dino joined the rush to sign up with the Red Cross volunteers, taking with him one of the family's cars, a red four-cylinder Diatto Torpedo, which he pressed into service as an ambulance, ferrying wounded soldiers from the battleground in the mountains to the hospitals in the Po Valley. But after a few weeks he enlisted in the Air Force, joining the ground crew of Squadriglia 912. This outfit's most celebrated member was the fighter ace Francesco Baracca, who shot down thirty-four enemy aircraft in his French-built Spad biplane before plunging out of the sky to his own death in 1918, an event which was to make its mark on the Ferrari family's history.

Enzo was still living at home when Alfredo senior suffered an attack of bronchitis early in 1916. It quickly turned into pneumonia, and within days he was dead. Later in the year the elder son, too, died in a sanatorium at Sortenna di Sondrio from an unspecified malady contracted at the front. 'That', Ferrari wrote, 'left me desperately alone with a mother who would have loved to keep me by her as life began pitilessly to draw me away from her side.'

Not only was the head of the family business gone, but so was his presumed heir. All that was left was an eighteen-year-old boy who wanted to be an opera singer but did not have the voice, who wanted to be a sports journalist but did not have the training, and who wanted to be a racing driver but no longer had access to the sort of family income that might have provided him with the means to make a start. Without his father, the Ferrari metal-fabrication business was finished. Young Enzo, waiting to be drafted, got a job with the local fire brigade as an instructor in their lathe-workers school, using the knowledge he had picked up from his father. In 1917 his call-up papers arrived, ordering him to join the 3rd Mountain Artillery in the Val Seriana, north of Bergamo, where a Piedmontese second lieutenant, noting his background, gave him the job of shoeing the mules that were dragging field guns through the Dolomites.

Perhaps the Modenese climate of a hundred years ago was not the healthiest in which to grow up. Within months of joining his mountain regiment Enzo too fell ill, seemingly with pleurisy, and was transported to a hospital in Brescia, where two operations prevented him joining his father and brother in the next world. His complete recovery came only after a prolonged and dismal period of convalescence at the Barracano centre in Bologna, a group of old huts reputedly intended for incurables where he could hear, as he lay in his bunk, the coffinmakers' hammers echoing the early-morning sound his father's workmen had made what now seemed like a lifetime ago.

He returned to the war at the wheel of a Fiat, as a driver for a man called Pacchiani who was in charge of supplies. On the morning of 11 November 1918 he awoke from a night spent sleeping on a bag of onions in a warehouse to discover that an armistice had been announced. 'I saw a group of workers around a street light changing the bluish bulb used for the curfew for a bright white one,' he wrote. 'That was how I knew the war was over.' Of the 5,000,000 Italians who fought in the war, 700,000 had died and 250,000 had ended it as invalids.

He was quickly demobbed. There was a home for him back in Modena, where his mother was waiting with pleas for him to return, but he had no idea of what to do next. 'I was back where I had started,' he wrote. 'No money, no experience, limited education. All I had was a passion to get somewhere.' A passion and, in his pocket, a standard letter from his commanding officer, recommending him for employment. Straight away he took it to Turin, where he made an appointment at Fiat. Founded in 1899, the Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino had been taken over in 1907 by one of its three founders, Giovanni Agnelli, and his family, and was already involved in many levels of industry as well as motor cars. Wartime production had enabled it to quadruple its employment roll to 18,000, and it was about to launch the 501 model, which would become Italy's first mass-production economy car. But it was Fiat's commitment to a racing programme, enshrined in his memories of Nazzaro and Lancia hurling their machines around the roads near Bologna, that fired Ferrari's dreams of joining the company.

On a cold winter's day he found his way to the company's offices on the Corso Dante, where he was ushered into the presence of the engineer Diego Seria, 'a stalwart man with close-cropped reddish hair turning grey', who sat behind a mahogany desk in a room furnished with green velvet drapes. Having explained his desire to work with automobiles, the interviewee received a polite but conclusive response. Fiat, Seria said, wasn't big enough to provide jobs for all the unemployed ex-servicemen in Italy.

Ferrari left the plush warmth of Seria's office and returned to the Corso Dante. Walking down the broad boulevard, the wind biting through his clothes, he reached Valentino Park. He found a bench overlooking the banks of the River Po. He brushed the snow from the seat.

'I was alone,' he wrote. 'My father and my brother were no more. Overcome by loneliness and despair, I wept.'

He wept, but he did not give up. He stayed in Turin, living off the remains of a 'tiny inheritance' from his father, and found his way to the Bar Nord, not far from the main railway station, the Porto Nuova. The Nord was frequented by aviators and automobilists, and it was there that he befriended Romolo Bonacini, a mechanic who pointed him towards lodgings at the nearby Hotel Bologna, where he took a small room in the middle of the hotel, near the laundry room. Soon he also had a boost to his morale in the form of a job, thanks to a man named Giovannoni, a Bolognese with a garage on via Ormea. Post-war Italy was developing a ravenous appetite for motor cars, and demand was outstripping supply. In order to help satisfy it, Giovannoni took Lancia Zeta light trucks, stripped off the bodies, reconditioned the parts, and prepared the chassis for delivery to coachbuilders who would provide them with new passenger-car bodies. Ferrari tested the unclothed chassis and engines, then drove them to one of the three workshops of Carrozeria Italo-Argentina of Milan, where fashionable 'torpedo' bodies were installed for the benefit of the customers who visited the firm's showroom.

In Milan he would stop by the Café Vittorio Emanuele, where sporting types and would-be wheeler-dealers gathered. There he met Marco Garelli, soon to be famous for building motorcycles, and Ugo Sivocci, a former bicycle racer who had competed in the 1913 Targa Florio, the eighth running of a race around the Madonie mountains of Sicily. Sivocci had just taken a job as the chief test driver with a new company called CMN, Costruzioni Meccaniche Nazionali, which until the armistice had been making four-wheel-drive tractors for towing guns, replacing the mules Ferrari had shod. Now CMN was assembling passenger cars from surplus parts discarded by the Isotta Fraschini company. Sivocci was happy to recommend his new friend's qualities to one of CMN's directors, and by Easter 1919 the company had taken him on as an extra driver to test and deliver their cars. He rented a room from a widow at 1 corso Vittorio Emanuele and plunged into another new world. When Garelli entered one of his new motorcycles in a race from Milan to Naples, Ferrari and Sivocci followed the rider, Girardi, in a CMN car which they had turned into a refuelling wagon. When Girardi broke a wheel in Capua, they helped him mend it.

It was during adventures such as this that Ferrari began to sense a reawakening of his childhood ambition to become a racing driver. On Sunday, 5 October 1919 he took part in his first competition, the Parma-Poggio di Berceto hillclimb, a time trial up a fifty-kilometre course on the slopes of Monte Piantonia in the foothills of the Apennines. Driving a 2.3-litre CMN Tipo 15/20 tourer, which he had just bought at a considerable discount, he was competing against rivals driving Fiats, Opels, Bianchis, Bugattis, Aquilas, Italas and Alfas. The regulations issued by the Pro Parma club required him to be accompanied by a riding mechanic, as all racers were in those days, to help with wheel changes and mechanical mishaps. Ferrari chose Nino Berretta - 'a young man who had been around a lot, brilliant, enterprising, and very much liked by a lot of women'.

He was familiar with the road, originally built by Marie Louise, the Duchess of Parma and the second wife of Napoleon, to link her estates in Emilia with others she owned in Lunigiana. But on a cold and damp day, with wisps of fog lingering in the valleys, it presented an intimidating test. He waited for the start, with the number 29 painted on the sides of his bonnet, watching the aces preparing themselves, chief among them Antonio Ascari in his thoroughbred 1914 Fiat Grand Prix, with a 4.5-litre engine which he tuned himself in his garage in Milan.

The first car, the Aquila of Count Carlo Alberto Conelli, left at 7.30 a.m. Ferrari was not due to see the starter's flag until 10.55. By that time Ascari had already made his ascent, breaking the record and setting a time of 38 minutes and 11.2 seconds, an average speed of 52 mph. When Ferrari set off, along roads lined with spectators, he felt that he was being thrown scraps of applause which were all that was left after Ascari's triumphant passage. But by the time he reached the famous Piantonia steps, a steep climb with many hairpin bends, the spectators had thinned out and his attention was occupied by the demands of the unmade road with its unstable verges, unpredictable gutters, rock walls and unprotected drops. Hauling on a vast steering wheel almost two feet in diameter, trying to coax every last ounce of power from the CMN's engine, he climbed from 200 ft to 2,700 ft above sea level in a time of 50 minutes and 13.2 seconds, good enough for twelfth place overall and fifth in the 3-litre class.

In those days all motor races, even local hillclimbs, presented an enormous challenge. Few events ever presented a more fearsome one than the Targa Florio, the invention of Count Vincenzo Florio of Sicily, a renowned motoring pioneer. Florio's plate was the reward for the winner of a time trial around the Madonie mountains in the north of the island, passing through the narrow streets of villages such as Cerda, Collesano and Campofelice. But in 1919 merely reaching the event was an accomplishment, particularly if you had to start from Milan. Ferrari and Sivocci both entered the Targa Florio, taking Berretta and another mechanic, Ripamonti, with them. They left Milan in their CMNs, planning to drive down to Naples where they would load the cars on to a steamer, the Città di Siracusa. But as they passed through the Abruzzi mountains they faced an unexpected ordeal. 'We found ourselves in a blizzard', Ferrari wrote, 'and we were chased by wolves. They were put to flight, however, by shots from the revolver I always kept under the seat cushion, and by the arrival of a group of road gangers armed with torches and guns.'

They arrived in Naples just as the Città di Siracusa was about to cast off its mooring ropes, but the stevedores were persuaded to reopen the loading doors - thanks to 'the unspoken understanding between the unprivileged and poor', Ferrari claimed, adding that he had started out with only 450 lire in his pocket. That night he and his companions suffered terribly from the combined effects of a rough crossing and predatory insects.

The 1919 Targa Florio, the tenth edition of a race that was to survive more or less unchanged for another fifty years, had attracted a powerful field. The Italian entries, headed by Ascari's Fiat and the Alfa of Giuseppe Campari, a would-be opera singer, were opposed by two French teams, the Peugeots of André Boillot and Rémy Reville and the eight-cylinder Ballot of René Thomas, a former motorcycle racer. Ferrari and Berretta, swathed in overcoats and caps, set off the day before the event to try to learn as much of the 108-kilometre Medio Circuito della Madonie as they could manage in a single day, preparing for a race in which the competitors would be required to complete four laps. Ferrari and Berretta were in the middle of their reconnaissance lap when a violent storm forced them to abandon their efforts. Even when, years later, the course was cut in half again, it was still terrifying. In its longer forms its challenge was nothing short of elemental. Such a course could be closed to normal traffic only in the loosest of senses. At any moment a peasant on a bicycle, wobbling along with a load of hay on his back, might wander into the road. And the lap was too long for the sort of communications that would provide the competitors with an idea of where they stood in the race at any given moment. All they could do was give it everything, or as much as they dared on the stark and inhospitable mountain roads of Sicily.

The day of the race produced rain on the low-lying sections, snow in the mountains, and mud everywhere. Goggles quickly became caked. Some drivers used gauze masks to keep the stuff out of their mouths and noses. Within a lap, a car's racing number would be illegible. Ferrari started at 8.02 a.m., just behind Boillot's Peugeot, but his effort was hampered within the first few miles by a loose petrol tank. He and Berretta spent more than forty minutes stationary while they repaired the fastening that secured the tank to the chassis, relegating them to last place. Then, on the final lap, as their car entered Campofelice, they met three policemen standing in the road, arms raised. The carabinieri told the puzzled racers that they would have to wait: the new President of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, a Sicilian elected only a week earlier, was making a speech in the village square. Ferrari and his companion waited with mounting frustration while Orlando, not a man of few words, continued his oration. And even when he had finished, the CMN was forced to let the President leave first in his big black De Dion Bouton limousine and to follow behind at a processional pace until, after several miles, the official party turned off.

Ferrari pushed the CMN as hard as he could, but by the time he reached the finish line the officials and spectators had disappeared, relieved to escape the weather. Only a single policeman was left, charged with the duty of recording the last stragglers, all of them outside the official limit of ten hours. The policeman had an alarm clock with which to take their times, and he was rounding them out to the nearest minute. The following day a furious Ferrari stormed into the Palermo office of Vincenzo Florio, demanding justice. Having listened to his case, Florio agreed to list him as the last official finisher, in ninth position, two places behind Sivocci. The race was won, at an average speed of about 40 mph, by Boillot, who had not been able to avoid running into a wandering spectator near the finish line, with fatal results. Ascari and his mechanic ended up in hospital after overturning their car in the mountains. Newspaper reports of the race presented a variety of versions of the events surrounding Ferrari's unusual result; decades later the finding that Vittorio Emanuele Orlando had apparently visited Termini Imerese rather than Campofelice that day seemed to throw doubt on the specific accuracy of Ferrari's own account - not the last time his version of an event would be questioned.

That was his last race for CMN. The company was having little commercial success and for his first race of 1920, a return to the Parma-Poggio di Berceto hillclimb, he acquired a more powerful vehicle, a 1913 Isotta Fraschini with a 7-litre engine, four-wheel brakes and a rakishly streamlined radiator. A new mechanic, Guglielmo Carraroli, seated alongside him, Ferrari raced to his first significant result: second in his class and third overall. Giuseppe Campari, the opera singer, won the race in his Alfa. Ascari had missed the deadline for entries by half an hour, and had been refused the chance to defend his trophy. From a brief meeting with Campari there developed a lasting bond. 'We became close friends,' Ferrari said. 'There was something very special about Campari. So open, so sincere and straightforward that he remained unassuming, even at the height of his fame. He was not just an exceptionally skilful driver but also an indefatigable fighter, a man for whom risk was part of the act of winning.'

There were two more insignificant and unsuccessful races in the Isotta, but for his return to the Targa Florio in October he established a relationship that was to exert a decisive effect on the shape of his life. His involvement with Alfa Romeo of Milan was to turn him into a star in the motor-racing firmament, and then to cast him out in such a way as to turn his implacable need for revenge into a powerful weapon.

It began with a bit of a joke. Alfa Romeo had its origins in a company - Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili - founded by Cavaliere Ugo Stella, a Milanese notable, in partnership with the French firm Darracq. The joint concern took over the derelict Darracq factory in Portello, a suburb of Milan, but the partnership lapsed during the war, when the Italian side of the company switched to making shells and trucks for the army. Afterwards Nicola Romeo, a mathematics professor, had taken a leading role and given his name to the rejuvenated company, which soon began to participate in racing once more and was developing fast, lean, responsive machines that would get results and attract customers. Ferrari joined their number when he ordered a G1 model, a powerful 6-litre car based on the design of an American car, the Pierce-Arrow. He had placed his order with Giorgio Rimini, Alfa's sales and racing manager. Described by Ferrari as 'swarthy of complexion, with staring eyes and a cigarette permanently hanging from his lips . . . keen, intelligent and full of drive', it was Rimini who responded to Ferrari's complaints about the non-appearance of the car by producing the signed contract. Somewhere near the bottom of the small print was a clause proclaiming that the car would be delivered 'as soon as possible, or even earlier'. That experience, Ferrari recalled, taught him to read every contract down to the very last word before signing on the dotted line.

The incident certainly did nothing to damage his growing friendship with Rimini, who gave him a place as a junior member of the Alfa Romeo team, where he would line up alongside some of Italy's finest drivers and work with engineers and technicians who would be at the leading edge of the development of racing cars in the years between the wars. It was a time of turmoil for Italy, communists and anarchists making common cause against the black-shirted Fascists, and coinciding with Ferrari's appointment in August was the occupation of the Portello works by Alfa Romeo's workers, who flew the red flag from the factory pole and shut down production as part of a general wave of action throughout Milan.

By October, normal working hours had been restored. There were three Alfa Romeo cars ready at the start of the 1920 Targa Florio, led by Campari. Michele Conti was in the mechanic's seat of Ferrari's car, a modified pre-war touring machine. Again the conditions were dreadful, constant rain during the week of the race washing away much of the loose road surface, often leaving sharp stones projecting out of the earth. In an effort to mitigate the effects of the weather, the Alfas were equipped with gauze screens and mudflaps added by the firm's chief designer, Giuseppe Merosi, a qualified surveyor whose assistant, Antonio Santoni, was a pharmacist. This time there were neither wolves nor presidential parades to obstruct Ferrari's progress, just a rival driver, Guido Meregalli, in a car manufactured under Nazzaro's name. Meregalli saw Campari, the pre-race favourite, retire on the second lap with water fouling the low-mounted spark plugs of his engine, and held off Ferrari, whose determined attack in the closing stages earned him second place overall and victory in his class. Meregalli, distressed and exhausted by the ferocity of the race, tried to get out of his car at the finish line but found himself unable to stand up. The first truly outstanding result of Ferrari's career, at the wheel of an unremarkable car in a very demanding race, it confirmed his place in a team whose number soon expanded to include Antonio Ascari.

Ferrari developed a particular regard for the more experienced driver, the son of a grain merchant from Mantua. 'Antonio was a man of real character, exceptionally energetic and truly brave,' he wrote. 'He was utterly fearless, with a talent for improvisation - the sort of driver we used to call a garibaldino, meaning the reckless, intuitive kind who didn't scrupulously walk the course in advance but felt their way into every bend, getting closer and closer to the very limits of tyre grip as lap followed lap.' To Ferrari, it may have been equally significant that Ascari had also established a business relationship with Alfa Romeo, becoming the firm's dealer for the Lombardy region, using his own successes to boost sales.

Not until 1923 and a race called the Circuito di Savio was Ferrari able to achieve his ambition of passing the chequered flag as a winner. Held on 17 June on roads outside Ravenna, starting and finishing in front of the basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe, the race plunged through pine forests and down long full-throttle straights. With a young Alfa mechanic named Giulio Ramponi alongside him, Ferrari held off a fifteen-strong field over the distance of 225 miles and was borne aloft in triumph by the crowd, who had broken the police lines. That afternoon, before he and Ramponi drove back home to Modena in the dust-covered Alfa, he was introduced to Count Enrico Baracca, the father of the late fighter ace in whose squadron his brother Dino had served. 'From this meeting', Ferrari wrote, 'another followed with the mother, Countess Paolina. It was she who told me one day, "Ferrari, put the prancing horse of my son on your racing car. It will bring you luck." I still keep the photograph of Baracca with the dedication by the parents in which they entrusted me with the emblem. The horse was, and has remained, black, but I myself added the yellow background, this being the colour of Modena.'

Scepticism has often accompanied Ferrari's account of how he acquired the device of the cavallino rampante, which has become such a potent symbol of the company, its cars, its victories, and its all-pervasive myth. Some believe that the horse was not Baracca's emblem at all, but that of the whole Squadriglia 912, and therefore not within the gift of his parents. Others claim that, since the rearing black horse is in fact the symbol of the city of Stuttgart, Baracca must have cut it from the fabric fuselage of the aeroplane of one of the German pilots he shot down, as aces on both sides were wont to do whenever there was the opportunity to follow a victim down. Indeed, Baracca is said to have shot down an Albatross carrying such a shield, piloted by an unnamed German from Stuttgart, over Tolmezzo, near Udine, in November 1916.

The fact that Ferrari did not use the emblem until 1932 has been presented as another reason to cast doubt on the integrity of his tale and to accuse him of embroidering the story of his meeting with Baracca's mother in order to add colour to his own myth. Ferrari was certainly shrewd enough to be thinking already about the appeal of such a connection. But until 1930 he did not have a team of his own, so before then he could hardly have had any practical use for a symbol of his own. When he considered the time was right to express the autonomy of his own organisation, the prancing horse was ready to be unveiled.