📍Balcarce, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina
1911 – 1938“I was born in Balcarce, a small town in the rolling farmland of Buenos Aires Province, in June 1911, the fourth of six children of Italian immigrants. My grandfather, Giuseppe, had come from Castiglione Messer Marino in the Abruzzo and bought a farm near Balcarce by making charcoal. My father, Loreto, was a stonemason and plasterer, and my mother, Herminia, kept house. Ours was a hard-working, modest family, and I grew up among the fields, the gauchos and the dusty roads of the pampas. At about eleven, I started sweeping the floor in a mechanic's workshop in town, and I soon learned to start the engines and move the cars. By thirteen I was an assistant mechanic at a Studebaker dealership, and I learned everything about engines by taking them apart and putting them back together. I also loved football; I played inside forward for the local club, and they called me El Chueco, the bandy-legged one. I left school early to work, and I spent my youth in the garage and on the football field. After military service I opened my own garage in Balcarce, and in 1934 I raced for the first time, in a Ford taxi I rebuilt myself. I raced across the roads of South America for years, and in the 1950s I won the Formula One world championship five times. In 1986 the Museo Fangio opened in Balcarce, in a historic building in the town centre, and I rest there now among the cars, in the town where I grew up.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today