Alfredo Ferrari

Alfredo Ferrari was the father Enzo Ferrari, founder of the Scuderia Ferrari Grand Prix motor racing team, and subsequently of the Ferrari car manufacturer. He died as a result of a widespread Italian flu outbreak along with son, also named Afredo.

Born in 1859, 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 married Adalgisa Bisbini and 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.