At 50, This Italian Classic Still Gets You There With Style
A recent movie depicts an Italian vision of the perfect morning: sun-bathed buildings, no traffic, trees in full bloom.
And a Vespa with a full tank.
Motorbikes are a key element in Italian life, providing not only cheap transport but lots of panache as well. The Vespa, the granddaddy of them all, turns 50 this year.
The waves of nostalgia are already big and will get bigger in advance of an international Vespa gathering in June on the Italian Riviera and the opening of a museum by the Vespa manufacturer, Piaggio, at the corporate headquarters in Pontedera near Pisa.
At the same time, Piaggio is trying to continue a rebound after lean years in the 1980s. Honda scooters have cut into Vespa sales in some cities. The Vespa’s old rival, the Lambretta, plans to return to the market this year. But Piaggio still holds about 43% of the small scooter market in Europe.
Italy has generally run on fast-forward since World War II. The Vespa has remained an enduring constant. New models look very much like the originals: a wide front leg shield, bicycle-style handle bars, a tapered midsection and a flared and rounded tail--a shape that inspired the name Vespa, Italian for wasp.
Piaggio makes more powerful and flashier motorbikes, but the Vespa remains a mainstay. More than 200,000 Vespas were sold around the world in 1995; 15 million since 1946.
“The Vespa carries a lot more than just people. It symbolizes the reconstruction of Italy after the war,” said Roberto Leardi, head of the Vespa Club of Italy, which has about 80 chapters.
“I can still remember the days when a family of four would pile onto a Vespa. The father driving, the mother behind and the children on both ends.”
The veneration also extends beyond Italy’s borders. The U.S. representative to the International Federation of Vespa Clubs, Rolf P.J. Soltau, says some 48 Vespa clubs in the United States have a membership of more than 2,000.
Vespas were imported in the United States beginning about 1950, but that ended in 1984, largely because their two-stroke engines did not meet emissions standards, Soltau said from Los Gatos, Calif.
Soltau bought his first Vespa in 1951, when he lived in his native Germany. Now he owns four. In between, he estimates he has had dozens.
“I can’t count it,” he said. “I would say at least 40.”
Despite its range, the adoration of the Vespa is not universal.
“Yeah, sure, there’s lots of grand talk about the Vespa,” countered a Rome motorbike mechanic who just wanted to be called Bruno. He waved an oily wrench: “It’s just a bike with a motor.”
Many fans would surely disagree.
For riders, it represents a just-right blend of urban efficiency and Italian-style design elegance. “You look good riding it,” said long-time owner Enrico Albanese. “That, you know, is important.”
For movie buffs, the Vespa has traveled through some of the most memorable celluloid: carrying Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in the 1953 “Roman Holiday” and flash bulb-popping paparazzi in “La Dolce Vita” in 1960. Piaggio’s 1996 calendar features old publicity shots of movie stars, from John Wayne to Sandra Dee, astride or alongside Vespas.
In the 1993 movie “Caro Diario” (Dear Diary), filmmaker Nanni Moretti used a Vespa on a sunny morning to create a vision of paradise. His idyllic motor scooter ride through Rome in the opening of his autobiographical movie left tread marks right through the Italian psyche.
The scooter was conceived by the Enrico Piaggio, president of the family-run metal factory, and Corradino D’Ascanio, an industrial designer who helped develop the helicopter. Piaggio wanted to cater to the postwar demand for cheap transportation. D’Ascanio was intrigued by the drawing board problems of integrating power, practicality and looks.
Vespa sales rose steadily until the 1980s, when competition from Japanese-made scooters increased in Asia and consumer interest in scooters dwindled in Europe.
Piaggio cut back on advertising, scaled down its glossy calendars and suspended publication of its corporate magazine. That, combined with economic turnarounds in Europe, seems to have helped the Vespa make a comeback.
Somewhere out there, there is a man and his Vespa 150. Giorgio Bettinelli is on his third long-distance scooter epic after traveling from Rome to Saigon, Vietnam, in 1992-3.
In early 1995, he completed a nine-month trek from Anchorage, Alaska, to the tip of South America. Bettinelli left in September from Australia for a 22-nation journey to South Africa.
He was last seen somewhere in Burma.
