Belle Macchine Marks Italian Flair in BMW Style Showcase

From 7 June 2025, the BMW Museum will let visitors swim in la dolce vita as Belle Macchine. Italian Automotive Design at BMW” fills the famous Bowl with twenty-three coachbuilt treasures, razor-sharp sketches and a 360-degree art wall alive with Giorgio de Chirico’s dream-like imagery. Belle Macchine traces how Italian stylistic courage has shaped BMW since the 1930s, when German engineers first turned to Turin and Milan for fresh metal-working ideas and proportions no slide-rule could plot.

Walk in and the journey begins with fashion-house silhouettes and product icons before the spotlight falls on cars that rewrote Munich’s design playbook. Marcello Gandini’s wedge-shaped Garmisch concept stands centre-stage, its taut lines foreshadowing the first 3 Series and 5 Series. Nearby, the “Glaserati” 3000 V8, reborn after BMW’s takeover of Glas, shows how Bavarian straight-sixes and Italian curves once met on the autobahn. One-off jewels such as the Pininfarina Gran Lusso Coupé, Frua-bodied 2800 GTS and Fabrizio Giugiaro’s carbon-finned Nazca M12 demonstrate the playful rivalry that spurred both sides to greater heights.

Visitors stroll upward on gently banked ramps, passing images of Concorso d’Eleganza brilliance at Lake Como, before arriving at the BMW Vision Neue Klasse and M1 Hommage – tomorrow’s ideas forged in yesterday’s Mediterranean sunshine. Animated sketches projected onto the Bowl’s circular walls link past to present, underscoring a shared language of lean surfaces, precise feature lines and drama balanced by engineering rigour.

Belle Macchine is more than a history lesson; it is a rolling dialogue between Latin passion and German discipline. Each car on display proves that when Italian artistry meets BMW’s technical backbone, the result is not simply beautiful, but enduring – a reminder that the road between Milan and Munich runs both ways and is paved with pure design ambition.