Taken from Motor Sport, August 2023

It has been asked, what did the Romans ever do for us? Around 29BC Agrippa had the Roman mile standardised at 1620 yards. Two millennia later, Benito Mussolini’s Fascists obsessed about establishing a prestigious new ‘Roman Empire’. From 1933 fellow narcissist Adolf Hitler followed a similar route in German terms. For both, motor racing seemed an ideal stage upon which nation and national industry could strut.

While the French had firmly established their great Grand Prix de l’ACF, in 1906 – the first truly national motor race to join it as a perennial series was the Gran Premio d’Italia, first run near the Italian industrial city of Brescia in 1921. When the infant Gran Premio was moved to Milan’s new Monza autodrome for 1922, proud Brescians felt slighted.