If you want to touch history, book a trip to Italy. Here, past and present are neighbors. Ancient relics and modern marvels dance cheek-to-cheek, reminding us that so much of what we cherish today was first discovered, cultivated and enshrined by societies that walked this earth ages ago. In a world that’s constantly rushing down dead ends in pursuit of the future, a place like this helps us remember that, as human beings, our wants and needs haven’t really changed.
I’m speaking, of course, about Miataland. It’s a resort in the hills of central Italy that’s a sanctuary for Mazda’s perennial roadster. Here, in the infinite, picturesque hills of Perugia, you can grasp the full four-generation history of the MX-5 while enjoying a European vacation focused on that universal pastime: Driving along gorgeous mountain roads in lightweight, drop-top sports cars. It’s here, at an offbeat bed-and-breakfast in the green heart of Italy, that the Miata’s eternal goodness comes into perfect focus.
It started, as these things do, on an internet forum. Andrea Mancini had already amassed a collection of nine Miatas at his home in Italy, and he was about to land the white whale: His first M2 1002, a hand-built, Japan-only roadster from a short-lived Mazda spinoff company. The car had been shipped to England where it was spotted by a member of a Miata forum. Someone figured out the car was destined for Italy, which got the message boards churning with speculation.
“They said, ‘It’s probably this guy in Milan—no, it’s this guy from Padua,’” Mancini said. He was a forum lurker, reading and researching but never posting. “It was funny, because I knew I’m here, and they knew nothing.”
It took months for Andrea’s M2 to reach Italy. The day he brought it home, he broke his forum silence, posting a photo of the rare roadster, the crown jewel of his 10-Miata collection.
“I published the picture and I said, remember this?” He sums up the forum’s reaction with a gesture: Hands exploding on either side of his head, the international symbol for mind blown. The discussion-board hot-shots couldn’t believe this newbie had built such a collection without anyone noticing. Accusations of Photoshop flew.
To prove he was legit, Andrea invited local forum members to a barbecue at his home. Ten Miatas showed up, carrying 20 guests.
“I discovered that they were absolutely like me, with absolutely the same passion,” he said. They ogled his fleet, passed around tips, and stormed the hills in a mini road rally. An idea began to form.
Andrea and his wife, Claudia, had spent years living in Rome, a city too dense even for a modest collection of compact MX-5s. They searched the countryside and found the perfect property at the edge of Piedicolle, a rustic village of a few hundred people in the farmlands of central Italy. The original house was nearly 250 years old, but a new building, half-complete, stood ready to become an automotive agriturismo—a rural bed-and-breakfast for travelers searching out Miata nirvana.
Miataland is the home every car enthusiast dreams of building: A beautiful estate, high on a secluded hillside, decorated exclusively with automobilia and absolutely overrun with cars. The guest house is a bright, airy brick building, tastefully modern without disrupting the old-world surroundings. The downstairs furniture consists mainly of Ducati and MV Agusta motorcycles on stands, infusing the welcome room with the evocative scent of oil and aluminum.
Five guest suites occupy the upstairs, each named for a different Miata paint color. The bedframes are modeled after the triangle-punched backbone that forms an early MX-5’s powerplant frame, familiar to anyone who’s clambered underneath an NA or NB. My room, the M2 Blue suite, included a chair made from a pristine Miata driver’s seat, so unmarred that I felt bad sitting in it.
Out front, a rotating selection of NA, NB and ND roadsters sit on display under the pavilion, ready for guests to drive on Miataland’s daily guided road tours. (There’s an NC in the collection, but you’ll rarely see it. “We never use it,” Mancini said. “No one wants it.”) Every visitor also gets a tour of the sun-baked longhouse at the back of the estate. Here, crammed tighter than a fresh pack of cigarettes, you’ll find most of Mancini’s 52-car Miata collection, believed to be the biggest in the world.
Miataland is the home every car enthusiast dreams of building: A beautiful estate, high on a secluded hillside, decorated exclusively with automobilia and absolutely overrun with cars.
The innkeeper slides open a heavy glass door and invites me into the stacks of his personal Miata library. The MX-5 set a Guinness World Record as the world’s best-selling two-seat convertible sports car 24 years ago, and maintains an uncontested hold on that title to this day. Mass production rarely generates collectibility, but each roadster in Mancini’s barn pinpoints a special moment, a unique sub-variant of Mazda’s globally beloved drop-top.
A widebody, supercharged NA built by Japanese tuning house Nopro sits cheek-to-cheek with a Ford 302-powered Monster Miata V8 conversion, recently imported and still wearing Texas license plates. Rebodied roadsters range from a faux Bugeye Sprite to an MX-5-based kit car that presents a nearly convincing vision of a Ferrari 250 GTO. Race cars, special editions, rarities and oddballs find their home at Miataland.
Mancini’s automotive tastes run wide—a few dozen non-Miata vehicles ring the property, lurking under gray car covers like kuroko stagehands—but it’s here, in the heart of the warehouse, that we see his true obsession.
“I’m passionate about Mazda MX-5s, but I’m crazy for M2s,” Mancini told me. Established in 1991, M2 Incorporated was Mazda’s enthusiast-car skunkworks, building freaky variations on mainstream Mazdas in the feverish days before Japan’s mid-’90s bubble economy burst. The M2 1001 “Cafe Racer” was a stripped-down, lightweight NA, with manual everything, firmed-up suspension and a shot of extra horsepower; The 1002 “Vintage” was luxed-out with a retro instrument panel and brushed aluminum details. M2 built fewer than 700 upgraded Miatas before Japan’s economic crash brought the JDM golden era to a screeching halt.
“In all of Europe, right now, there are five M2s,” Mancini said. Gesturing toward various corners of the warehouse, he pointed out all five.
Mancini was in college when the NA Miata launched in 1989. It took 10 years to realize his dream of owning one. He worked at a Ford dealership in Rome when a young woman traded her MX-5 on a new Ka. He snatched up the little roadster, then traded it a few years later to buy his first brand-new car, a special-edition NB limited to 50 examples in Italy. He led me to that car, parked in the geographic center of the garage, wedged between support beams. It would take a week of clutch-slipping Tetris-in-reverse to clear a path for this Miata to reach daylight.
“You remember the smell of a new car?” Mancini pops open the door. A whiff of new baseball glove greets me. The off-white leather upholstery is without blemish or wrinkle. The odometer reads 34,000 Km. He was making payments on this NB, but he still missed his NA.
“I promised myself never to sell any more of my cars,” he said, gesturing at the jinba-ittai traffic jam around him. “This is the result.”
Miataland welcomed its first guests in 2018. The resort is open spring, summer, and fall, ”when it’s possible to drive with the top down,” according to the proprietor. After breakfast and coffee, guests are invited to enjoy the main Miataland attraction: The road tour. Visitors pile into the Miatas of their choosing and Andrea and a colleague run the convoy on a two-hour drive along the cinematically beautiful backroads of the Italian countryside, stopping for food and photos, swapping between cars, and generally enjoying life al fresco.
The morning after I arrived, we readied for our tour. Silvano, a former pizza chef turned Miataland employee, led our trio in a Soul Red ND. Andrea and I both chose 1.8-liter NAs, his in Sunburst Yellow, mine in glorious British Racing Green.
It’s been more than a decade since I owned an early-build MX-5. Sliding behind the wheel, the Miataland roadster felt immediately familiar, like a long-lost pair of sneakers. Most NAs have watched three decades pass by their pop-ups. That kind of age on a car usually brings fussy behavior, finicky cold-starts and special instructions. No such nonsense here: Our roadsters fired up instantly.
“Any other car that’s over 30 years is an old car, full stop,” Andrea said. “I have a Peugeot 205, a Golf GTI—beautiful cars, but they are old.” He joked, with Italian sardonicism, that if his resort specialized in Alfa Romeos or Fiats, he’d never have enough running cars for a tour. “When you drive an NA, you understand Mazda was really unbelievably ahead of all the others.”
Our route took us down the hillside, across the fertile valley, and up toward San Venanzo. Raspy four-cylinder music echoed down the narrow roadways. Driving the green MX-5 was a conversation with an old friend, quirks and all. Still a little warm in the footwells, just like I remembered. The power windows still crawled and groaned, and I was still about an inch too tall to nestle in the wake of the windshield. With the steering wheel dancing in my hands and the stubby shifter snicking into gear, I forgot every foible. On this day, on this road, the NA Miata was perfection.
We stopped to admire the Comune di San Venanzo, a prim palace that for centuries has served as municipal headquarters for the village and its surrounding farmlands. Across the courtyard stood the ruins of a 13th-century medieval castle. I had one of those American-tourist moments, struggling to grasp the depth of history standing in front of me. In the US, we build museums around relics half as old, deifying them into solemn irrelevance. Village employees strolled by, just another morning commute past irreplaceable, tangible history.
Andrea nodded at the weathered facade of the Comune.
“I like that it’s imperfect,” he said. “It’s not artificially restored.” I turned my gaze to our Miatas. The British Racing Green roadster showed 245,000 Km on the dash. Years of touring through farm-country dust had spiraled its paint. The numbers on the wooden shift knob were fading. The drivetrain and suspension were crisp and tight, but you’d never mistake this car for a garage queen.
The Mazda Miata’s history spans the globe. The MX-5 idea was hatched by California car journalist turned Mazda product planner Bob Hall. He wanted a modern incarnation of a canonically British vehicle—a lightweight, two-seat drop-top, engine up front and rear-wheel drive—and wouldn’t shut up about it until the bosses in Japan agreed to give it a shot.
"I like that it’s imperfect, it’s not artificially restored."
Designer Tom Matano was born in Japan, but was stationed at Mazda’s North American headquarters when he penned the timelessly cheery first-generation Miata. That car debuted in Chicago in February 1989, perhaps the least likely setting on earth to launch a sporty convertible. No matter: By 2016, Mazda had sold over a million Miatas worldwide, every one of them built in Hiroshima. Japanese by birth, culturally English, with a heavy dash of dauntless American optimism, the Miata lives outside of time or nationality, built to the same basic formula today that Hall and Matano concocted in 1989.
I expected a fleet of Miatas to feel out of place in Italy, home of legendary makers of romantic, impassioned, illogical automobiles. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Alfa Romeo and Fiat have abandoned the classic roadster; Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Maserati never had much interest in everyday sports-car buyers. All of these marques now chase constant evolution, one-upping each other as they race toward the latest short-shelf-life automotive fad.
The Miata persists precisely because Mazda refuses to mold it to fickle automotive trends. Like the villagers of central Italy, Mazda has figured out a way to preserve eternal history in modern life, changing just enough around the edges to keep irrelevance at bay. What other sports car has held so tightly to its founding ethos for 35 uninterrupted years? What other sports car can claim a 35-year lineage at all?
You don’t need to visit Miataland to enjoy driving an MX-5. The magic of the Miata is that it feels great pretty much anywhere there’s a curvy road and a chance to lower the top down. But if you want a European vacation away from the tourist traps and you want to spend a day driving the quintessential roadster of the last three decades, all in one trip?
Miataland is always the answer.
