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[[Image:Ettore Bugatti.jpg||thumb|left|Ettore Bugatti]]

'''Ettore Arco Isidoro Bugatti''' (September 15, [[1881]], Milan, died on August 21, [[1947]]) was an Italian automobile designer and manufacturer.

He came from a notably artistic family with its roots in Milan. He was the elder son of [[Teresa Lorioli]] and her husband [[Carlo Bugatti]] (1856&ndash;1940), an important Art Nouveau furniture and jewelry designer. His younger brother was a renowned animal sculptor, [[Rembrandt Bugatti]] (1884&ndash;1916), his aunt, [[Luigia Bugatti]], was the wife of the painter [[Giovanni Segantini]], and his paternal grandfather, [[Giovanni Luigi Bugatti]], was an architect and sculptor.

Before founding his own automobile company, Ettore designed a number of engines and vehicles for others.  [[Prinetti & Stucchi]] produced his 1898 [[Type 1]].  From [[1902]] through [[1904]], [[de Dietrich]] built his [[Type 3]], [[Type 4]] and [[Type 5]], as well as the [[Type 7]] and [[Type 8]]un der the Dietrich-Bugatti marque.  In [[1907]], Bugatti went to work for the [[Deutz Gasmotoren Fabrik]], designing the [[Type 8]] and [[Type 9]].

On his own time, Bugatti developed the [[Type 2]] (in 1900 and 1901), and the 1903 [[Type 5]].  While at Deutz, Bugatti built his [[Bugatti Type 10]] in the basement of his home.  In 1913, Bugatti designed a small car for Peugeot, the [[Peugeot Bebe]].

Although born in Italy, Bugatti's eponymous automobile company was set up in [[Molsheim]] in the Alsace region, now part of France.  Ettore Bugatti was its technical innovator, developing a number of engines and chassis for the numerous models produced over the next three decades.  The company was known for the advanced engineering in its premium road cars and its success in early Grand Prix motor racing, a Bugatti winning the first ever [[Monaco Grand Prix]].

Ettore Bugatti also designed a successful motorized railcar, the [[Bugatti Autorail]], and an [[Bugatti Airplane|airplane]], though this never flew.  His son, [[Jean Bugatti]], was killed on August 11, [[1939]] at the age of 30, while testing a [[Bugatti Type 57G|Type 57 tank-bodied race car]] near the [[Molsheim]] factory. After that, the company's fortunes began to decline.  World War II ruined the factory in Molsheim, and the company lost control of the property.  During the war, Bugatti planned a new factory at Levallois in Paris and designed a series of new cars.

Ettore Bugatti was interred in the Bugatti family plot at the municipal cemetery in Dorlisheim near Molsheim in the Bas-Rhin département of the Alsace region of France.
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His design sketches include clothes, neck-ties, shoes, suitcases, chairs, cabs, railroad engines, buildings, furnishing, pistols, motorboats, airplanes, dog-collars and a thousand other objects typical of the twentieth century civilization.

We are not referring to "Leonardo Da Vinci Reborn", but to a personage who won more than three thousand competitions with his racing cars and has now become part of myth, of legend. Ettore Bugatti is one of the most extraordinary characters delivered to history by the four-wheels world. His artistic genius was unquestionable and his ideals can be summed up with the term "Bugattism", expressing a peculiar philosophy which has no equal in the entrepreneur world of our century. Born in Milan in 1881, the son of a carpenter and furniture restorer of peasant family, he helped in his father's work since a young boy. The inspiration to build motorcars came to him at the age of twenty, when a family friend let him try a petrol tricycle, the kind a vehicle that people used to call an automobile.

Bugatti, who had learned from his father about precision in work details and the necessity of relying on the support of people who count, perceived at once that this vehicle had a future as an instrument of freedom. He soon got involved in the motorcar business, starting at the firm Prinetti and Stucchi and building in Ferrara a car for counts Gulinelli; he then turned draftsman and technician for such manufacturers as De Dietrich, Mathis and Deutz. But providing freedom to others meant to Bugatti finding his own inward freedom to create, invent and live, and he felt that he could not find in the industrial centers of his country the right place where to build his cars in "peace".

So he emigrated to France, near Molsheim in the Alsace region, where he bought an old, abandoned dye-house with surrounding property and set, in 1909, the foundation of what can be defined as the "Bugatti's Kingdom".

In Molsheim green countryside Bugatti could give free play to his passion for horses (the radiator mask of his cars recalls the shape of a horseshoe) and at the same time give life to a limited production of cars distinguished for their efficiency, functionality and ease of adaptation to sporting or tourist requirements. In the twenties and thirties Molsheim turned at one time into factory, farm and dwelling for Bugatti, his family and his workers, and also became a meeting point of the well-to-do society of the period. Aristocrats, kings, sultans, princes, rich industrialists made up the list of Bugatti's customers and he gave them hospitality in his Molsheim "palace", including relaxing horse-rides. No term other then "Bugattism" can express better his life philosophy, a medley of feudalism and paternalism, which made him know his workers one by one, including their families, have houses built for them, grant them loans and take care of their problems.

The Bugatti's cars and their myth came to life in this safe haven. The first in the series was the type 13 model, which proved a thoroughbred from the very beginning and became a protagonist of racing competitions. In the years that followed the classic light-blue cars flooded the tracks of the world and even today the number 35 calls to mind the model of a famous car created by Ettore's talent. After the 35 model Bugatti created many other competition cars and top class tourist cars. The Royale was a status symbol of the thirties, reserved to a few lucky owners, as indeed only six of these cars were produced, instead of the planned 25. The type 57, a most versatile car which was successful in racing competitions and also as an elite car, marked the end of an epoch and of a myth. The economic depression, the skyrocketing production costs, the family-style management, the death of his son Jean during a car test, the outbreak of WW II and, finally, the passing away of Ettore Bugatti himself obliterated the Bugatti star from the motorcar firmament.

What remains today of the creative genius of the Molsheim founder are the splendid cars lovingly preserved all over the world, the photographs showing him on horseback wearing a bowler hat, the museum in Alsace where many of his sketches on the most varied objects are collected. They include the sketch of a castle which remained a dream, the house he had in mind of building as his residence on the island facing Alassio. Cerebral embolism, which struck him in 1947, prevented him from building this palace, which probably would have been the peak expression of "Bugattism".

*Taken from Bugatti Classic Cars Magazine, Nr. 4, 1988*