MODENA, Italy

AT age 22, Enzo Ferrari sold the house where he was born to buy a racecar, and although the founder of the renowned sports car company failed in several attempts later in life to buy back that house, as of Saturday it has become a museum dedicated to his memory.

The Enzo Ferrari Birthplace Museum, in this city of 175,000 between Milan and Bologna, includes the house where Ferrari was born in 1898 as well as a new building designed with a shiny yellow aluminum roof made to look like the hood of a car, air vents and all. The house is attached to the workshop of Ferrari’s father, a carpenter and mechanic for the Italian railway.

“I remember coming once to see the house when I was a kid, but it wasn’t with my father because he never wanted to come back,” said Piero Ferrari, Enzo’s son, the auto company’s vice chairman. “He always said that if he couldn’t buy it, he didn’t want to go into a house owned by other people. He asked me if the staircase near the entrance was still there.”

The staircase is indeed still there, leading up to the room where Enzo was born; the Ferraris lived in the house until Enzo was a young adult. Those small, freshly painted rooms now house the offices of the Fondazione Casa Natale Enzo Ferrari, the foundation behind the museum’s construction. The museum starts in the attached workshop, where multimedia presentations recount the life of the racecar driver who made the leap to manufacturer of legendary sports cars.