The Ferrari museum, website here, is off the beaten tourist track, being located by the factory at the edge of Maranello, itself a few miles from Modena and the nearest autostrada.
Disclosure: I am not a Ferrari fan. Never was, though I like the styling of a number of the road cars from the late 1940s to the very early 1960s. And it was some of those cars I had hoped to view at the museum.
Alas! The museum is virtually free of examples from before the mid-1960s, Formula 1 racers excepted (but still not many of the early ones). Why is this so? My hypothesis is that Ferrari kept many of its racing cars, which is why there are plentiful examples from over the decades. But the firm made few road cars during the early years, all with carrozzeria-furnished bodies, and apparently all were eventually sold. (For example, "Inter" series Ferraris totaled only 143 units.) Such that survive are worth a lot of money that the museum apparently did not want to spend on its collection, hence their absence.
The museum shop is well stocked with items for fans, however.
The Museo Nazionale dell'Automobile in Turin (link here), is located about two miles from the central train station. From there you can catch the subway that gets you to about a ten minute walk from the building.
The collection is largely arranged chronologically. The cars are displayed in overly-elaborate (in my opinion) settings with dramatic lighting, background photomurals, and such. All that display jazz represents the fashion seen all too often in recent years, and the cars themselves are overwhelmed. Moreover, the atmosphere is dark, so to avoid using flash, I used my iPhone rather than my compact Nikon to take pictures.
Even though the museum is located a few blocks from the old Fiat factory, the cars on display were not strongly Fiat-oriented. Most examples were Italian, though there were a few American, German and British cars along with a Russian Pobeda from 1957.
The Alfa Romeo museum was the most satisfactory of the three, in my judgment. Its main problem is its location, out in the Milan suburb of Arese. Getting there by car is no problem, as it is close to the A8 autostrada. From central Milan you might take a taxi, but that option is costly. I followed the instructions from the museum's web site and took the subway and then a bus to get there. The bus runs only once an hour or so, which makes timing a planning factor.
Only one display -- racing cars -- was annoyingly jazzy. Plenty of noise, and illumination that cycled low to high and back, making photography difficult.
Car selection was good from about 1938 onward, though there were a few examples from before. Vehicles were spaced far enough apart that one could photograph them from most angles. Besides a museum shop, there were a coffee shop/restaurant and a showroom displaying current models. (I skipped these last two because I wanted to catch a bus in time to get me back into Milan so as to do other touristy things.)
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