Ferrari Museum Honors Sergio Pininfarina It's one of the classic partnerships in automotive history: Two Italian nameplates, Ferrari and Pininfarina, automaker and design house, have long been associated with cars that many enthusiats consider to be the greatest sports machines ever made. At the museum adjacent to its Maranello factory, Ferrari is honoring the design work of Sergio Pininfarina and those who worked for him, largely responsible for creating the carmaker's evolving look over some six decades. The exhibition runs through Feb. 24. "The Great Ferraris of Sergio Pininfarina" fills three halls with concept cars, racecars, grand tourers and items from Pininfarina's private collection, including paintings, drawings and even a four-decades-old wooden styling buck used in the process of crafting a body in metal. Sergio Pininfarina, who began his Ferrari work in 1952 and died last July, was the son of the design house's founder, Battista "Pinin" Farina. The family's name was later officially changed to match the one-piece company name. Museum literature credits Sergio for "combining an almost artisanal creativity with new technologies and wind-tunnel testing in his approach to each new model." His body of work, including dozens of models that are coveted by car collectors and fill countless coffee-table books, is all the more remarkable because at the time the relationship began, many automotive experts believed it to be doomed. The founder, Enzo Ferrari, was never known as an easygoing kind of guy. "It's like putting two prima donna in the same opera," acknowledges Pininfarina's own Web site. Yet the Ferrari-Pininfarina pairing produced one remarkable car after another, decade after decade. And the museum's dramatic staging and lighting for the nearly two dozen pristine classic, concept and competition Ferraris renders even the more common examples, like the Dino 206 GT and the 308 GTS, nothing less than gorgeous. Here in their Maranello birthplace - a small industrial town dominated by Ferrari, its history and its prancing horse logo - they somehow engender even more affection. The museum, which claims to have been host to more than 250,000 visitors last year, is located at Dino Ferrari 43 in Maranello. It's in the heart of the Northern Italian Emilia Romagna region nicknamed Motor Valley, because of everything sleek, shrieking and fast that's built there, including Lamborghinis and Maseratis. It's a two-hour drive from Milan and there's also a shuttle service from the Modena rail station just a dozen miles away.