In Florence, on display alongside Leonardo, the great masters of the Modenese coachbuilding tradition

It was not easy to imagine a continuous thread connecting the armourers who beat sheets of metal in Renaissance Florence to fashion knights' armour; Leonardo da Vinci's intuition of the self-propelled carriage; the internal combustion engine built and patented by Barsanti and Matteucci in the mid-nineteenth century; and the Modenese panel beaters who created jewels such as the Ferrari Testa Rossa and GTO, the Maserati 450 S and "Birdcage", and even the American Shelby Cobra.