Great Drives: Mille Miglia, Italy Once a death-defying race, this is now "the world's flashiest classic car meeting" ©Mike Dodd A Jaguar C-Type passes through Rome during last weekend's Mille Miglia rally The Mille Miglia was dreamt up one night in 1926 by Count Aymo Maggi, a 23-year-old northern Italian aristocrat, and three of his racing compagni. They were concerned that Brescia, the birthplace of car and cycling daredevilry in Italy (the city held its first "Speed Week" back in 1904), was losing its edge. The Grand Prix had moved to Monza a few years earlier and the place had gone a bit stale. So Maggi and his friends came up with something preposterous. They would stage a road race (on terrible roads) all the way to Rome and back. A loop of a little more than half of Italy. Everything was -issimo from the very first running the following year. Hundreds of cars. 1,600km of twists and turns. Closed roads. In the dark and in the rain. Stopping only for fuel. The race openly evoked the nation at its grandest, hence the Roman measurement: the Thousand Miles, the Mille Miglia. The Fascists loved it. Mussolini entered a car. His son, Vittorio, hauled himself round in a Fiat 1500 coupé. And the people turned out. There is an undeniable, deep connection between Italians and the art of driving fast. Last weekend, when I walked among the old cars, the magnificent, insect-like Bugattis and the creamy Porsches lined up in the pouring rain in Brescia for this year's recreation of the race, I came across two Italians in their sixties standing over the red bubble of an Alfa Romeo. As boys, they told me, they used to stand by a dangerous corner outside Brescia, judging the gear changes of the exhausted drivers and cheering those who refused to slow down. No brakes? Perfetto," one said. His friend nodded. There was something in the blood. "We are lovers," he said, "of velocity." Millions stood on mountain passes to see the Mille Miglia in its full, swerving pomp and to revere the Italian drivers who mastered it: Clemente Biondetti, who won the race four times after breaking 24 bones in a motorcycle accident; Tazio Nuvolari, "the Flying Mantuan" and inventor of the four-wheel drift, who liked to turn his lights off to catch his rivals by surprise. But it was an Englishman in a Mercedes who brought the Mille Miglia to its apogée, in 1955, when Stirling Moss, racing against 520 other competitors, completed the course in a frankly impossible time of 10 hours and seven minutes. Moss and his navigator, the motoring journalist, Denis Jenkinson, drove the course four times in preparation, grading hundreds of corners as either "saucy," "dodgy" or "very dangerous." They ran over a sheep in the process and maintained an average speed in the final race of almost 98mph. "Looking up," wrote Jenkinson, in his account of the drive, "I suddenly realised we were overtaking an aeroplane." Defenders of the Mille Miglia always insisted that the accident rate - the "shunts," the "butcher's bill," in racing parlance - was surprisingly small. Still, it was banned, twice. First, in 1938, when a Lancia Aprilia took off from a level crossing outside Bologna and killed 10 spectators, and then, for good, in 1957 - just two years after Moss's historic drive - when the 17th Marquis de Portago, the godson of the King of Spain, lost control of his Ferrari at 165mph, not far from Brescia. The car cut a telegraph pole in two, ploughed through the crowd and ended up in a small canal. Eleven people died, including the Marquis, his co-driver, and five children. Since 1987 then, in its careful reincarnation, the Mille Miglia has been, most emphatically, not a race. Instead, it is the world's flashiest classic car meeting. Only vehicles that could have run in the original 24 races are eligible to enter and only the most distinguished are chosen (415 were included this year). Wealthy enthusiasts queue up to take part and carmakers use it to showcase their favourite old racing cars alongside new models. I was invited by Jaguar to drive its new F-Type sports car along the course, while celebrities such as Sir Chris Hoy and Daniel Day-Lewis were given the keys to the old, tongue-shaped C-Types that used to hare around, half a century ago. The Mille Miglia, we were assured, is different now. It is run over two and a bit days. Drivers stop for the night. The roads are open so anyone can join in. It is - just to be absolutely clear on this - no longer a race. Everyone just drives as fast as hell. Vintage cars parade on day two I had never driven a sports car before, so climbing into the F-Type - a rather wonderful, brutal machine - I felt a bit like a bullet being loaded into a gun. In the early-evening rain, we joined the cavalcade of Ferraris and Maseratis and prewar contraptions that looked like downed aircraft, heading east from Brescia towards the Adriatic for the first part of the drive. We had not got beyond the Brescian outskirts before a few essential Mille Miglia characteristics began to establish themselves. There were the crowds. And that doesn't just mean hundreds of young Italian men lining the roadside, holding up signs saying "Gas!" and making unmistakable gestures telling you to floor it. It also means priests and young families gathered on roundabouts, grandmothers clapping from balconies. And there was the driving. Officially, all normal rules of the road apply, yet you enter a strange realm when police start hustling you through red lights. Whenever I thought I was driving too fast, there would be some berserk millionaire in his priceless automobile in my left-hand mirror, seeking death or glory in the middle of the road. Lake Garda came and went - a panel of green under a column of grey clouds. I was concentrating on not knocking the drinks out of the hands of the glitterati standing in front of their hotels. Then it was dark: the trunks of plane trees flashed by in the lights, and we juddered over recession-battered roads through Verona to Ferrara in time for a late supper before the old cars came in, revving their engines in the lee of the great Romanesque cathedral until two o'clock in the morning. It was only about 12 hours later, a few hundred kilometres outside Rome, that the Mille Miglia really began to take shape as a sensory experience. We had headed out of Ferrara on a road of gentle curves, into a broad cultivated plain. Farmers stood and watched from fields of barley. In Ravenna, we hopped out for a coffee and a glimpse of Dante's tomb before spiralling down towards the principality of San Marino in a haze of dandelion puff and birdsong behind a lemon-coloured Corvette. Superficially, the Mille Miglia is about speed. After the 1954 race, when Jenkinson went at more than 110mph on the road for the first time, he wrote: "I was very conscious about being in a realm about which I had no experience and the feeling was very odd to say the least, and I began to pay very close attention to all about me." Travelling very fast through the Italian countryside means things look different: fenceposts become bar codes, the clay lattices of farm buildings hypnotic; note-taking, when the roof is down, virtually impossible. Exhaust. Flying down side of lake. Olives. 2x speed limit," is the kind of thing I found scrawled at the end of the day. En route from Rome to Brescia on the final day More profoundly, though, the Mille Miglia is about a gratuitous state of movement. The northern half of Italy is not the Outback. Splendid civilisation surrounds you at all times. There are 147 towns on the Mille Miglia route and the whole idea is not to spend time in any of them. There is no earthly reason to do this, which is, of course, what makes the Mille Miglia glamorous, and infectious. A transmutation occurs. You become a Flying Mantuan. As we homed in on Rome at 100mph, passing businessmen with their ironed shirts hung up in the back seat, it began to seem crazy to stop anywhere at all. The thing was to keep moving. It was only seven o'clock, and the most beautiful evening. We could be in Naples for supper. Of course there is something rather heathen in this. At 8am the following morning, we were gunning our sports cars round the Coliseum. Bolsena - a beautiful lakeside pilgrimage site where a holy wafer began to bleed in 1263 - was a scrape of tiled roofs in the rear-view mirror. We dealt with Florence in 11 minutes. The reward though, is a genuine, rolling encounter with the Italian countryside. Valleys close into gorges that open into meadows. The air cooled as we left Rome and climbed into the hills and lakes around Viterbo, before the slopes parted - like a heavy green theatre curtain - to reveal the Arcadian carpet of Umbria, the cypress trees and bright white pathways. Siena and Florence fell below as we crossed the Apennines on the Raticosa and Futa passes: kilometre after kilometre of twisting roads and Alpine villages, rising to meet a grey slab of clouds while Italy spread itself on three sides around us. By Bologna, I admit, the thing had become a little crazed. In the mountains we had seen a woman laid out in the road, apparently hit by a car. In the city, red lights meant nothing, as the Mille Miglia swarmed through. Still there were crowds, still the cars drove faster. As the light began to fade, we slipped on to the Autostrada, to be in Brescia in good time for the red-carpet finale. It was raining as we returned to the north. The tyres beat on the lines of Tarmac like a drum. Sam Knight was a guest of Jaguar. Watch Jaguar's short film of the race at www.youtube.com/jaguarcarslimited Great Drives: Alone on the ring road Great Drives: An Indian road trip, from Calcutta to Sikkim Anyone can drive the course and watch the event (for the route see www.millemiglia.it) but numerous operators also run organised trips. For example, Classic Car Tours International has a five-day tour from £1,195, based on driving your own car, though rental can also be arranged. In Florence, Chianti Classic Car offers vintage car hire; Red Travel offers tours in rented, modern Ferraris