On Sportweek we tell you about the long epic of the racetrack. Triumphs, invasions, rulers. And then dramas, champions, great challenges. The Monza racetrack will celebrate its “grand prix of the century” tomorrow. Inaugurated on September 3, 1922, among royal families, expeditions to the pole and immense crowds, it has always been one of the temples of Formula 1
Andrea Cremonesi
– Milano
The sliding doors of history. What would have happened if Gaetano Bresci’s bullets had not reached Umberto I at the inauguration of the gymnastic field of the Forti e Liberi on the sultry evening of 29 July 1900? Probably the House of Savoy would never have dreamed of “decommissioning” the Royal Villa, so dear to the sovereign, not only for hunting trips, with its park, and probably these days we would not be celebrating the hundred years of the Monza racetrack, that tomorrow hosts the Formula 1 GP. Instead it is said that Vittorio Emanuele III, whenever he was passing through these parts, closed the curtains of the train so that his gaze did not fall on the place where his father had been murdered. Legend or reality, the misfortune closed a chapter of city life, which began when Maria Teresa gave the order to Giuseppe Piermarini, the architect of La Scala, to erect the summer residence for her beloved son, Archduke Francesco Ferdinando, governess of the Austrian Milan. In doing so she created the conditions for a new story made of speed, joys and sorrows.