Mugello Track Map Poster

Long before the circuit, the Mugello raced on mule tracks. From 1914 to 1970, a road race wound through the mountains north of Florence on a lap of some 66 km (41 miles); its last record, in 1970, was a single lap of 29 minutes 36 seconds. The circuit that replaced it, opened in 1974, runs 5.245 km (3.26 miles) clockwise through fifteen turns in the Tuscan hills, with 41 meters (135 ft) of elevation change.

The first race, in June 1914, was a regularity trial at an average of 45 km/h over roads little better than mule paths, a week before the shots in Sarajevo that set off the First World War. By the late 1960s more than 200,000 people lined those mountain roads, until the authorities demanded that all of them be fenced, an impossible task. The Automobile Club of Florence built a permanent circuit instead, and its layout has not changed since.

Most of its corners are named after the farms and cottages that stood where the track now runs, or after nearby villages. The best of them is Arrabbiata, “the angry one,” named after the lane up to it, so steep that it was a struggle on foot, on horseback or by bicycle. Between Poggio Secco, the highest point, and Arrabbiata, the lowest, the track drops 41 meters, more than twelve stories, and the main straight climbs for more than a kilometer, flattening out just before the first braking point.

The poster numbers all fifteen turns and names every one of them, from San Donato to Bucine, with the pit lane in a muted line. Rosso, the Italian design studio edition, suits the valley the Medici family came from. Most of the names on it are farms or villages of that valley; together they make a single lap.