The Buzz On The Streets
Sun Herald
Sunday July 13, 2003
The humble but oh-so-chic Vespa has zipped through our social and artistic culture for more than 50 years. No wonder a glossy new tribute has John Baxter all revved up.
The humble but oh-so-chic Vespa has zipped through our social and artistic culture for more than 50 years. No wonder a glossy new tribute has John Baxter all revved up.
Terry "The Toad", archetypal loser in his small Californian town, grudgingly admits to bubble-headed blonde Debbie that he doesn't even own a car - just "a little Vespa that I play around with".
"Why, that's almost a motorcycle," she purrs in George Lucas's 1973 movie, American Graffiti. "And I love motorcycles."
For generations of kids all over the world, the Vespa gave them what they most desperately wanted: wheels. Admittedly those wheels were only 21 centimetres in diameter. And the little bike did run with an insistent buzz like the wasp after which it's named. But it was mobility, man! With a scarf wrapped negligently around your neck and a friend perched side-saddle behind, you could weave among the cars jammed in traffic, and leave them eating your exhaust. Yet the Vespa wasn't greasily masculine. A girl could handle one and, just as important, look good on it. Once they began to appear in crimson and white, sales to women soared.
A new and comprehensive history of the Vespa, simply titled
Vespa: Italian Street Style and put together by the company that created the scooter, places it squarely in the mainstream of post-World War II culture.
The Vespa was the idea of giant Italian aeronautical company Piaggio. Strapped for cash after Italy lost the war and desperate to keep its factories at work, Piaggio hit on the idea of a motorcycle for people who weren't motorcyclists. The company's chief designer, Corradino D'Ascanio, specialised in aircraft and helicopters, but that expertise would be the making of the Vespa. Pre-war attempts at a low-priced city bike, such as the British Skootamota and Unibus, had all the style of motorised wheelchairs, and cost the earth, besides. D'Ascanio knew that, from its name to its look, his bike must have pizazz.
The 98cc two-stroke engine was, frankly, feeble and the three-speed gearbox awkward, but by enclosing them in a steel body owing much to the design of fighter planes - in Germany, manufacture would be franchised to Messerschmitt - he made technical drawbacks irrelevant. OK, it ran out of puff on steep hills, but with its chromed handlebars, and the trademark leg-shield sweeping back to streamlined and fluted engine casings enameled in snazzy green, it looked great.
Not that it was an immediate success. The first 47 sold as novelties, but the 48th and 49th just sat there, such an embarrassment to Piaggio's foundry manager and an engineer friend that they bought them for themselves, out of pity. They needn't have bothered. Within weeks, orders were pouring in. By 1946, Piaggio was turning out 500 a month, and not even starting to meet the demand.
In fast food, you sell the sizzle, not the steak: Piaggio sold the buzz, not the bike. Any film star who came to Rome would sooner or later be photographed astride one - even a tunic-clad Charlton Heston and a towering John Wayne, who was visibly desperate for a horse.
By the mid-50s, half the films made in Italy seemed to feature the little bikes - none more prominently than William Wyler's 1953 Roman Holiday, in which reporter Gregory Peck lures princess Audrey Hepburn away from her official duties to career around Rome on his Vespa 125.
Preparing for La Dolce Vita in 1960, director Federico Fellini hung out with the flash-snapping photographers of Rome's Via Veneto, and noted how they took off after their celebrity prey on Vespas, then wove through traffic back to their newspaper offices with the vital rolls of film. The film not only immortalised these predators and coined the name paparazzi - from Walter Santesso's character Paparazzo - but also pushed the Vespa even more prominently onto the world stage.
La Dolce Vita also conferred on the Vespa an edge of danger. It soon became the preferred transport of Rome's street thieves, who could grab a purse or snatch a necklace and be half a block away before the victim thought to scream. In Britain, Vespas even became symbols of revolt when they were adopted in the early 60s by Britain's Mods: street gangs who turned out in suits, ties and rolled umbrellas to rumble with rival Rockers in duck's-arse haircuts and crepe-soled shoes. When their clashes were immortalised in the 1979 film Quadrophenia, the sight of Sting riding into battle on the Brighton beachfront on his Vespa galvanised sales all over again.
From the Italian Lambretta to the French Solex, the British Moped and the American dirt bike, plenty of lightweight two-wheelers have challenged the Vespa, but Piaggio's creation remains supreme. Its latest incarnation, the Granturismo 200, powered by a four-stroke engine with automatic transmission and a top speed of 102kmh, would have scared the hell out of Audrey Hepburn, though it's probably closer to what aircraft designer D'Ascanio dreamt of when he did his first sketches in 1945. What, after all, is a wasp without a sting?
© 2003 Sun Herald
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