Vincenzo Florio, a wealthy pioneer race driver and automobile enthusiast who had already founded the Coppa Florio in Brescia in 1900, created the Targa Florio to celebrate Sicilian roads and the emerging culture of the automobile. The name targa means plaque or plate in Italian. Renowned artists including Alexandre Charpentier and Leonardo Bistolfi were commissioned to design medals, and a dedicated magazine, Rapiditas, was launched to celebrate the event and the speed of modern life.
The first race, run in 1906, covered three laps of a 148-kilometre circuit traversing winding mountain roads with approximately 2,000 corners per lap and more than 1,100 metres of elevation change per lap. Alessandro Cagno won the inaugural edition after nine hours at an average speed of just 50 kilometres per hour.
Several different circuit configurations were used across the event's history. The original Grande course covered 148 kilometres per lap and was used from 1906 to 1911. A grand tour of the Sicilian coastline, stretching to 975 kilometres per lap, was used from 1912 to 1914. A shortened Medio circuit of 108 kilometres per lap followed from 1919 to 1930. From 1932, the Piccolo delle Madonie circuit of 72 kilometres — lapped multiple times — became the standard configuration for the remainder of the event's life.
The Piccolo circuit began and finished at Cerda, descending from altitude through Caltavuturo and Collesano to sea level, then running along the Buonfornello coastal straight before climbing again through the hills. Even the shortest version featured some 800 to 900 corners per lap, making proper learning of the course a weeks-long undertaking. Some manufacturers, especially non-Italian teams, skipped the Targa entirely because of the difficulty of preparing for its unique demands.
The early decades of the Targa Florio established it as one of the great events in European motorsport. By the early 1920s, the race had become one of the continent's most important competitions, pre-dating both the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Mille Miglia. Mercedes won in the 1920s, with Christian Werner claiming victory in 1924 as the first non-Italian winner since 1920. In 1927, Eliska Junkova became the first woman to compete in the race.
When the Carrera Panamericana was cancelled after 1954, the Targa Florio took its place in the 1955 World Sportscar Championship. Mercedes-Benz used the opportunity to clinch the title, with Stirling Moss and Peter Collins finishing first and Juan Manuel Fangio and Karl Kling second in their 300 SLRs after more than nine hours of racing.
Porsche became the event's dominant force from 1956 onward, developing purpose-built mountain-circuit machinery including the Porsche 908/03 Spyder, a car derived directly from hillclimbing vehicles. Leo Kinnunen set the fastest ever lap in 1970 in a Porsche 908/3, averaging 128.571 kilometres per hour over the 72-kilometre Piccolo circuit — a reflection of how the mountainous layout capped outright speeds even with the fastest prototype machinery of the era.
The race retained World Sportscar Championship status through 1973, when it was removed from the calendar following a series of serious accidents during that year's event, including two fatalities among spectators. Critics including Helmut Marko, who described the race as "totally insane," had long argued that cars producing up to 600 horsepower racing through mountain villages while spectators stood roadside was incompatible with contemporary safety standards.
The Targa continued as a national event until 1977, when an accident in which hillclimbing specialist Gabriele Ciuti's BMW-powered Osella prototype lost bodywork and crashed, killing two spectators and injuring five, forced officials to stop the race mid-running. The Targa Florio as an automobile race was effectively finished.
Porsche honoured the race by naming the hardtop convertible variant of the 911 the "Targa." The event's name and spirit lived on in modern recreation rallies, including Targa Tasmania (from 1992), Targa New Zealand (from 1995), and Targa Newfoundland (from 2002). A separate Targa Florio Rally has been run on Italian roads since the end of the original race, as part of the Italian Rally Championship.
Over its 71-year and 61-race history across six circuit configurations, the Targa Florio was the most technically demanding road racing event of the 20th century — a race that required teams to arrive weeks in advance, that punished gearboxes, brakes, and suspensions relentlessly, and that rewarded local knowledge and mechanical reliability above all else.