Only in Italy? Visitors to the church of San Carlo in Modena expecting to admire the Baroque apse with its great plague painting would have been surprised during October to find seven cars inside the 17th-century building. Or rather, seven hand-crafted alloy shells, installed to celebrate the city’s long but fading tradition of automotive coachbuilding.

Created especially for the ‘Modenart – Sculptors of movement’ installation using traditional hammer and sandbag, five Ferraris (Nembo spider, Mondial 500 and three GTO variants), a Maserati 151/3 and a Daytona Cobra graced the church, formed by three of the same skilled master craftsmen who shaped these cars in period, by eye from simple drawings at the Scaglietti coachworks.

If this skill were treated as art, says the curator, “then Giancarlo Guerra, Afro Gibellini and Oriello Leonardi would be as well known as the GTOs, Californias, Testarossas they built with their own hands”.

While the exhibition has finished, you can still admire the works at tiny.cc/hr1mez.