The Mille Miglia was a 1,000-mile race from Brescia to Rome and back, run on ordinary Italian public roads from 1927 to 1957. In 1955 Stirling Moss and his navigator Denis Jenkinson covered it in 10 hours, 7 minutes and 48 seconds — an average of 97.96 mph, including every village, hairpin and level crossing. Nobody has ever gone round faster, and nobody ever will.
It cost 56 lives across its history. It was stopped once already, by Mussolini in 1938, and restarted anyway. In 1957 a tyre burst near Guidizzolo and eleven people died. Three days later Italy banned racing on public roads for good.

00:00 Intro
01:20 A town holding a grudge
02:11 What the race actually was
03:15 Nuvolari, 1930
03:54 It was stopped once before
04:46 Moss and Jenkinson, 1955
06:38 What it cost
07:30 The man who said it was too dangerous
08:35 12 May 1957
09:38 What happened afterwards
10:44 The race that still runs

Three things this video is careful about:
• The record average is 97.96 mph — 1,597 km in 10h 7m 48s.
• The 1938 ban is included, because it changes what 1957 means: Italy had already stopped this race for killing children, and restarted it.
• Alfonso de Portago had publicly called the race too dangerous before it killed him, citing the impossibility of learning 1,000 miles of public road. That is his argument, not this video’s hindsight.

There is no footage of any crash in this video, and no images of the Guidizzolo accident. Alfonso de Portago appears in the photograph taken of him at a checkpoint that day, which is a picture of two living people.

No race footage is used in this video.

Credits
1955 Mercedes 300 SLR.jpg — Calreyn88 — CC BY-SA 4.0
1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR FOS19.jpg — MrWalkr — CC BY-SA 4.0
Mercedes-Benz W196R 1955 Juan Miguel Fangio LSideFront MBMuse 9June2013 (14797035177).jpg — Valder137 — CC BY 2.0
Talbot-Lago T26 Grand Sport (10) – 1954 24 Hours of Le Mans.jpg — Jean Lattès — CC BY 2.0
Brescia – Piazza della Loggia (48743449483).jpg — Fred Romero from Paris, France — CC BY 2.0
Mille Miglia 2020 partenza N 19 Bugatti T 35 in Viale Venezia a Brescia.jpg — Wolfgang Moroder — CC BY-SA 3.0
Mille Miglia 2020 partenza N 75 Bentley 1934 frontale in Viale Venezia a Brescia.jpg — Wolfgang Moroder — CC BY-SA 3.0
2022-06-18 Mille Miglia Pavia Lancia Aprilia barchetta.jpg — UbeFoto (Flickr user) — CC BY-SA 2.0
1958 Ferrari 290 MM (48915082037).jpg — David Merrett from Daventry, England — CC BY 2.0
Mille Miglia 2017 Vicenza.jpg — Chichiz91 — CC BY-SA 4.0
Images via Wikimedia Commons.
Music: Crossing the Chasm — Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) — CC BY 4.0

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