MAUTO — National Automobile Museum

Turin was, in the early 20th century, effectively the Detroit of Italy — the city where Fiat, Lancia and a wave of smaller coachbuilders and parts makers turned the automobile from a novelty into a mass product. It was against that backdrop that engineer Cesare Goria Gatti and collector Carlo Biscaretti di Ruffia founded the National Automobile Museum in 1932, gathering vehicles that told the story of an industry the city itself had helped invent.

The collection grew over the following decades into one of the most historically important automotive holdings anywhere, tracing more than a century and a half of motoring from horse-drawn-era experiments to modern Formula 1. Its oldest exhibit, an 1854 steam-powered carriage built by Virginio Bordino, predates the invention of the combustion-engine car altogether and ranks among the oldest self-propelled vehicles to survive anywhere in the world.

Alongside the Bordino steam carriage, the collection ranges from Bugattis, Ferraris and other coachbuilt exotica to the unglamorous workhorses that actually motorised postwar Italy, none more emblematic than the Fiat 500 — proof that the museum values a car's cultural weight as much as its glamour or speed.

Carlo Biscaretti di Ruffia, one of the museum's founders, was far more than a collector: he worked as an illustrator, industrial designer and motoring journalist, producing posters and artwork for the Italian car industry through the 1920s and '30s. That eye for design carries through to the museum that bears his name today, one of the few car museums anywhere as interested in how vehicles were styled and marketed as in how they performed.

The museum is closed on Mondays, and it's worth budgeting at least two hours for a visit, since the 2011 renovation spread the collection across several themed floors rather than a single hall you can skim in twenty minutes. Interactive stations and immersive audiovisual rooms along the way are pitched as much at casual visitors as at committed car enthusiasts, so it rewards people who wouldn't otherwise call themselves car people at all.

MAUTO sits a little south of the historic centre, near the Lingotto district linked to Fiat's own industrial history, and is easily reached by tram from downtown Turin. Combining a visit with the nearby Lingotto building — the former Fiat factory famous for its rooftop test track — makes for a fitting double dose of the city's motoring heritage.