Gianni Torelli, the restorer MAUTO asked to teach his skills

Gianni Torelli has spent more than fifty years teaching century old engines how to run again, and on November 10 Turin's Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile put him in front of an audience to do it in public. The plan, laid out in the museum's own announcement, had Torelli open the bonnet of MAUTO's 1907 Fiat 130 HP at 6.30 pm at the museum's building on Corso Unità d'Italia, and walk through what it took to bring that engine back to life, in conversation with Davide Lorenzone, who heads MAUTO's Conservation and Restoration Centre. The Turin news site ierioggidomani.it and the sports website sportiamoci.it both previewed the talk in early November, ahead of the date, and neither has yet published an account of how the evening actually went.

Both previews describe Torelli as a mechanical restorer with more than fifty years of experience, the kind collectors turn to when an engine needs to run rather than just look right. The car he restored carries real history. Felice Nazzaro drove the Fiat 130 HP to victory at the 1907 French Grand Prix in Dieppe, a result confirmed independently by the car's Wikipedia entry, by the classic car site automobilismodepoca.it, and by Il Resto del Carlino, which also names Torelli, a mechanic from Campagnola in Emilia, as the man who restored it. The engine is a four cylinder unit of more than 16 litres, built when Grand Prix cars still looked like boilers on wheels. Automobilismodepoca.it reports that the restoration, carried out at MAUTO, took three years.

That question, of who inherits a hundred year old engine's knowledge, is not only Italy's. Ahmedabad's Auto World Vintage Car Museum, built on Pranlal Bhogilal's collection, owns more than 250 classic and vintage vehicles, with 112 on display, including early 1900s Mors, Minerva and Ford Model T cars, according to turuhi.com.

The same report says the museum keeps that collection running with a workshop team of mechanics, chauffeurs and engineers built up over the decades the family has been collecting. It is the same arithmetic MAUTO is testing in Turin with one veteran and a room of students: how much of a mechanic's hands on knowledge survives the mechanic.

The talk sat inside the third edition of MAUTO's Winter School, a course on historic car restoration run jointly with the Fondazione Centro Conservazione e Restauro La Venaria Reale, scheduled this year from November 9 to 13 and open to students, recent graduates, restoration professionals and specialists, sportiamoci.it reported. Its programme mixes lectures, demonstrations, laboratories, workshop sessions and visits to MAUTO's own restoration facility. The previous edition, held from November 25 to 28, 2025, ran 30 intensive hours across MAUTO in Turin and the CCR in Venaria Reale, Grugliasco24 reported, describing historic cars in the course's own framing as "a national heritage of great value" and its purpose as answering "the necessity of transmitting skills for maintenance and restoration, which would otherwise be lost."

Torelli's evening with Lorenzone was one session inside that five day course. What the Winter School has not yet published is how many of its students, after five days of lectures and workshop visits, go on to do the kind of unscripted, learned by hand work that took Torelli fifty years to master.

Sources

• Il futuro dell'automobile d'epoca. Martedì 10 novembre al MAUTO talk con Gianni Torelli
• L'arte di restituire il tempo
• Fiat 130 HP
• La Fiat 130 HP da Grand Prix restaurata parteciperà alla Londra-Brighton
• Al Cicciolo d'oro rombano i motori con la Fiat 130 Hp del 1906
• Winter School. Il restauro dell'automobile d'epoca
• Wonderland of vintage cars