Count Giannino Marzotto, winner of the Mille Miglia in 1950 and 1953, died in Padua Hospital in July after a long illness. He was 84. Marzotto will forever be remembered as the 22-year-old who took on the cream of world motor racing in 1950 and beat them at their own game, winning the Mille Miglia while wearing an impeccable double-breasted suit, white shirt and tie in his privately entered blue Ferrari 195 S coupé. He said afterward that he drove in his everyday attire because anything else would have distracted him from his objective of winning the race. That double-breasted suit is now part of motor sport folklore and is on display at the Mille Miglia museum in Brescia.
Count Giannino and his regular co-driver Marco Crosara won the race again in 1953, this time in a works Ferrari 340 MM (above). They beat 749 other entries, including the likes of Formula One World Champions Juan Manuel Fangio, Giuseppe Farina and Mike Hawthorn, as well as Stirling Moss, Luigi Villoresi and Eugenio Castellotti.
Count Giannino’s motor racing career was short-lived, however, because after winning the 1951 Grand Prix of Europe at Rouen-les-Essarts in a Ferrari 166 F2, France, and taking 5th place with his brother Paolo in the 1953 24 Hours of Le Mans driving a Ferrari 340 MM—the only works Ferrari to finish—he went to work full time in the family’s extensive textile business. His father, Count Gaetano Marzotto Jr., appointed him president and managing director of the company in 1967, but Giannino retired from that in 1969 in favor of his brother Pietro, and continued in other areas of business.
Always generous with his time, Count Giannino made hundreds of personal appearances as a double winner of the Mille Miglia, and was idolized by the enthusiasts who compete in the current annual commemorative event. To a group of them he once said, “When one celebrates the past, one must ask if there is a reason. The Mille Miglia was the image of technical, social and human progress, and we would do well to celebrate it, because this commemoration of the past helps the future.”
by Robert Newman
