SAN CESARIO SUL PANARO, ITALY — Don’t be fooled by the building’s homely exterior of brown tile and glass, or by its location in a nondescript industrial area some 20 miles northwest of Bologna. Inside is the two-story workshop of Pagani Automobili, maker of some of the world’s most advanced — and most expensive — cars.

To aficionados, the name Pagani is associated with supercars of exceptional performance and a level of craftsmanship achieved by a near-maniacal attention to detail. The price tag might seem crazy, too: the latest model, the Huayra, starts at 989,500 euros, or $1.3 million, before taxes and options.

Paganis “are not cars,” said Alessandro Pasi, deputy director of the Italian edition of Evo, a magazine devoted to high-performance cars. “They are objects bought by people who get pleasure from owning something unique, like a Picasso painting. The more unique the object, the happier they are.”

It is Leonardo da Vinci, not Picasso, whose inspiration is most often cited by the company’s founder, Horacio Pagani, an Argentine-born designer who turned his childhood passion into his profession.