What Does the Maserati Trident Mean?

The Fountain of Neptune stands in Bologna's Piazza Maggiore, in the city where the Maserati company was founded in 1914. The statue was fixed in place around 1566, and Neptune, god of the sea, holds a trident. Descriptions of the statue call him a figure of strength and vigour, and the whole fountain a symbol of Bologna.

The Maserati trident follows that statue. The emblem rode on the Tipo 26, the first car to carry the name, and the earliest archived badge is a metal plaque reading TIPO 26 with a black trident above MASERATI. The car in the photo is a Tipo 26 at the Circuito di Bologna in June 1927, with the trident on its radiator.

The company grew out of five brothers, Alfieri, Bindo, Carlo, Ettore and Ernesto, and was led by Alfieri. Wikipedia says Mario Maserati, another of the brothers, designed the trident at the suggestion of the family friend Marquis Diego de Sterlich. Mario is not shown here because we have no usable portrait of him, so the photo shows his brother Ernesto.

The date is less settled. One Wikipedia account says a brother used the symbol in 1920, while the first badge in the archive belongs to the 1926 Tipo 26, which came after the brothers stopped building cars for Diatto. Sources are not fully consistent, so the safe statement is that the trident was in use by 1926.

The classic badge is a white oval with a red trident above a navy band that carries the name in white capitals. It was drawn this way from the 1950s, after earlier ovals in gray and red. Maserati has not published a reason for the red and navy, and none of the sources we checked gives one. People sometimes link the colors to Bologna, but that is a guess.

What the record does show is a long period of small changes. The oval first appeared in 1937, the year the Orsi family bought the company, and was redrawn with a heavier navy frame in 1954. The modern flat version arrived in 2006.

In 2015 Maserati dropped the oval, leaving a black trident above the name in widely spaced capitals. The latest version, seen with the MC20 launch in September 2020, keeps the trident and swaps the capitals for a slanted script with long horizontal strokes. The trident now often appears alone on the grille, as on the GranTurismo, or as a small badge on the nose and side.

Despite the redraws the shape is still three barbed prongs on a short shaft, the shape of the Neptune statue's trident.