A thousand square metres of the metalworking plant that built Benelli motorcycles: the last piece of industrial archaeology left in Pesaro, and today a museum with a hundred and fifty machines on permanent display.
At a glance
The buildings at Viale Goffredo Mameli 22 are the historic premises of the Benelli metalworking company, the firm that helped write the industrial history of Pesaro. The city’s museum authority calls the thousand square metres here the last example of industrial archaeology in the city. The Museo Officine Benelli was set up by the Comune di Pesaro together with the Moto Club T. Benelli and the Registro Storico Benelli, later joined by the Associazione Terra di Piloti e Motori; a hundred and fifty Benelli motorcycles stand on permanent display, with original documents, photographs and film of the models on show.
Key facts
- Company founded: the spring of 1911, in Pesaro, by Teresa Benelli
- First motorcycle: the Velomotore, 1921
- Address: Viale Goffredo Mameli 22, Pesaro, Marche, Italy
- Today: Museo Officine Benelli, with the Registro Storico Benelli
- On display: 150 Benelli motorcycles, over about a thousand square metres
- GPS: 43.91319, 12.90684 · Open in Google Maps
History
In the spring of 1911 Teresa Benelli, recently widowed, put the whole of the family capital into a mechanical workshop so that her six sons would have certain work. The shop repaired what came through the door and made some spare parts for cars and motorcycles, but the six brothers wanted something larger: to build motorcycles of their own. The first of them, the Velomotore, appeared in 1921, and by 1923 the youngest brother, Tonino, was racing the machines of the new Pesaro marque.
The company’s own account of its beginnings is the source for those dates. What our sources do not say is when the firm moved into these particular buildings on Viale Mameli, and so this page gives them no date of their own: the 1911 workshop was elsewhere in Pesaro.
What is here now
The works hold the museum run with the Benelli historical register: production motorcycles and racing machines, together with the company’s own documents, photographs and film. It is the surviving industrial fabric of the firm rather than a reconstruction — the reason the city describes it as its last piece of industrial archaeology.
This page has no photograph yet
We have not found a freely licensed photograph of these buildings that we may publish. If you hold one — or if you are at the museum and can send one — we will add it to this page with the credit you ask for, as the opening image or in a gallery.
Sources & resources
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