The Canepa Museum

Upstairs#

We spent our first ten minutes with one small car: a Fiat Abarth, white with a red stripe, parked in the kind of direct afternoon sun that museums usually protect their exhibits from. Here it fell straight across the floor and nobody seemed worried.

A white Fiat Abarth with a red stripe in afternoon window light

The room held race cars the way other rooms hold furniture: wood ceiling, white walls, eucalyptus in every window, and a placard at each set of wheels listing what the machine had won.

The Abarth in the museum room, sunlight pooling on the floor

A blue single-seater race car under the window

Fiat Abarth lettering across the red and white roof

Further in#

The deeper we went, the stranger the cars and the longer the placards. Old Indianapolis roadsters with hand-lettered sponsor names. A row of racing Porsches whose histories read like service records. A motorcycle wearing a full teardrop fairing. Two dragsters. A machine with Porsche turbo painted on the side of what was unmistakably a tractor, which I am still thinking about.

A yellow Indianapolis roadster in window light

A blue and white Indianapolis roadster, another behind it

A red Indy car displayed overhead, another below

An orange sports prototype among taller race cars

A white Porsche 934 race car down the museum aisle

A row of racing Porsches under their placards

The pale blue and orange Porsche was there too, the one that even people who do not care about cars have seen somewhere before.

The nose of a Martini-striped Porsche prototype

A teardrop-faired motorcycle glowing in front of a window

Dragsters and a sprint car on the museum floor

The machine painted Porsche turbo, with a tractor tire

The shop floor#

At the back, a railing. Below the railing, the part of the building that does not hold still: Gullwing Mercedes with their doors up, an orange 911 in mid-surgery, somebody’s tires stacked and waiting. The museum upstairs is just the portion of this place that has been asked to be quiet for a while.

Looking down at an orange 911 mid-service

A Gullwing Mercedes with its doors up on the shop floor

The workshop floor from the balcony, cars and stacked tires everywhere

The confession#

None of this was planned. The day was supposed to be Santa Cruz: the Boardwalk, the beach, that was the whole itinerary. Then a building came up beside the road with too many cars around it to miss, so we turned in without knowing what it was. We looked it up afterwards: famous, apparently. That afternoon we may have been the only people in the building still finding out where we were.

The showroom#

Downstairs the placards turn into price lists. A white 918 Spyder holds the middle of the floor, a green 959 keeps to itself, a Ford GT waits in the dark end, and past them it is 911s in every direction, so many that after a while we stopped pointing them out to each other.

A green Porsche 959 and the 918 in the showroom

A blue Ford GT in the dark end of the showroom

A blue Mercedes SL beside a yellow Porsche

A black 911 and a green one, a low prototype beyond

A wood-rimmed steering wheel behind a blue windshield

We left before doing anything financially irreversible.

Santa Cruz, eventually#

Two hours later we were where we had been going all along. The Boardwalk in late October runs at half power: no lines, low sun, roasted corn on the air. We did not ride anything. We walked, and let the place carry on around us.