Aldo and Mario were born in Montona d'Istria, Italy, where their father, Gigi, managed a 2,300-acre farm. After World War II Istria was occupied and annexed by Yugoslavia. His family, like many other Italian Istrians, fled in 1948. They lived in a refugee camp from 1948 to 1955 until they were able to move to a two-room flat with the help of their uncle Quirino, who was a priest. Quirino would use a motorbike to visit his parishioners and Aldo and Mario would occasionally ride their bike with his tacit approval. In 1954 Aldo and Mario befriended Sergio Seggiolini and Beppe Biagini, who ran an auto-repair shop across the street. The boys would soon perform menial jobs for them, including parking customer cars although they were both underage and did not have a driving license. In 1954 Seggiolini and Biagini expressed their gratitude by taking Aldo and Mario to a trip to the Monza, where they saw Alberto Ascari racing. In 1956 the family settled in Nazareth, Pennsylvania and the brothers were able to rekindle their interest in motorsport when they discovered an oval track in their home town.
Racing career
Aldo and Mario rebuilt a 1948 Hudson Commodore into a stock car in 1959, and began racing it without telling their parents. They flipped a coin to see who would race in the first race. Aldo won the coin toss, the heat race and the feature. They each had two wins after the first four weeks. Aldo fractured his skull in a serious crash near the end of the season. He recovered from his coma, and he returned the following season. Aldo continued racing on the USAC and IMCA circuits, but in 1969 Aldo suffered severe damage to his face after crashing into a fence in Des Moines, and quit racing. His face had 14 fractures to his facial bones. Mario described the accident in his book What's it like out there: "Aldo continued racing until August 17, 1969, when he had an accident, which was not his fault, in an IMCA sprint race at Des Moines, Iowa. He was driving a sprint car that I had bought for him." In 1973 he opened retail business, Andretti Firestone, in Brownsburg, but he later quit to establish a machine shop for hospital beds and tool manufacturers called Andretti Machine Engineering.
