The Vespa motor scooter is emblematic of all that is romantic and carefree about the Continental lifestyle, a virtual symbol of Italy, and a stylistic icon readily connected with youth and adventure. For many parts of the world, Vespa scooter are also a workhorse of basic transportation, a ubiquitous urban presence in European and Asian nation – the buzzing of motor scooter is still heard throughout ancient alleys and wide boulevard. With more than 15 million sold in a half-century of production, Vespa models are far and away the best-selling motor scooter of all time.
For Italians, the Vespa scooter has a broader meaning, symbolic of their country’s reemergence as a major industrial power from the shambles of World War II. It shows how a complex economic problem can be reduced to the elegant simplicity of a motor scooter. And Vespa designs serve to demonstrate the Italian sense of style and innovation.
From its roots of providing basic transportation and the bare beginnings of economic survival for the people of Italy devastated by World War II, to its role as treed-setting fashion accessory during the turbulent 1960s, the Vespa motor scooter has retained its general design and overall mission. The style and culture fit in well with today’s youth, who appreciate the retro charm and post-industrial. Old scooters fauns parked in garages and basements are being resurrected, restored, and ridden by a new generation.
Piaggio, the company that developed and produces the Vespa scooter, goes back more that a century, founded in Genoa by Rinaldo Piaggio in 1884 as Societa Anonima Piaggio. Originally dedicated to producing woodworking machinery, the company was soon engaged in building railroad cars for the booming rail industry. Latter, the company built commercial vehicles, automobiles, and boats. During World War I, Piaggio began to take part in the fledgling aviation industry by making airplane parts in 1914, and the following year, entire airplane. Piaggio’s innovative bent soon emerged as he developed such advances as as pressurized cabins and retractable landing gear. An aviation engine designed by Piaggio set 20 word records during the 1920s. In 1938, Rinaldo Piaggio died, leaving the company’s two factories in Tuscany to Enrico Piaggio, 33, and his younger brother, Armando, 31. The timing for two young industrialist to take over their father’s business couldn’t have been worse, as fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had cemented his power in Italy and was poised to enter a pact for world conquest with Germany’s Nazi leader, Adolph Hitler.
During the war, the factories cranked out aircraft for the Axis war effort, developing several fighters and Italy’s only heavy bomber. Naturally, the factories became prime targets for Allied bombing raids. They were hit again and again, and at war’s end, the factory lay in ruins, and more than 10,000 Piaggio employees were out of work. But then, much of Italy was a shambles, all its industries bombed and destroyed, its people poverty stricken and demoralized. Under terms of the Allied peace agreement, Piaggio was banned from producing aircraft, which left Enrico Piaggio, who by then had taken over the business, casting about for a new product once he had rebuilt a factory in which to produce it.
NECESSITY, THE MOTHER OF VESPA
Transportation was a struggle in post-war Italy. Automobiles were expensive and in extremely short supply, even if people could find enough gasoline to run them. Most of Italy’s workforce depended on a scant number of bicycles to fulfill modest transportation needs. Piaggio, with his background in transportation, saw the need of the people and a way to get his factories humming again with a product that would be relatively easy to produce and allowed under terms of the peace agreement. And as it turned out, it was a product that would boost the morale of a defeated nation. Soon, he was devising a new kind of basic vehicle so innovative that it would forge his mark on the second half of the twentieth century.
Piaggio didn’t invent the motor scooter. It had been tried before, but without much real success. The earlier scooter were mired in bicycle and motorcycle technology, failing to move beyond the tried and true, and turned out to be heavy, clumsy, and slow. Piaggio’s vision of a scooter was absolutely unique, more like a two-wheeled auto-mobile than a bicycle—a clean, comfortable vehicle that a could be driven by anyone with ease.
Piaggio had observed a failed effort by the Italian army to provide small scooters for paratroopers. Called the Aeromoto, it was produced by the Turin company, Societa Volugrafo, and design to be parachuted out of airplanes along with the soldiers, who would use them to buzz their way over to the battle front more quickly. Perhaps a good idea, but the Aeromoto was so poorly designed, underpowered, and unstable that the plan was quickly abandoned, along with the scooters.
In 1945, two of piaggio’s design engineers, Vittorio Casini and Renzo Spolti, produced a scooter based on a small motorcycle being built at his Biella plant. They had taken an earlier scooter design, the peculiar SIMAT designed by Vittorio Belmondo in the late 1930s, and built on the basic idea. What they produced was an ungainly contraption, nicknamed Paparino, the Italian derivative of Donald Duck, which mockingly reflected its odd, ducklike shape. Piaggio himself described it as “a horrible-looking thing,” and it was soundly ridiculed by the press and public.
But from those humble efforts, Piaggio saw the spark of genius. Paparino had fired his emplotees back to work and Italy back on wheels. Piaggio wanted to build a new kind of scooter that would be inexpensive, economical, light-weigh and maneuverable, and able to be ridden comfortably by women as well as men. He wanted the rider of his scooter to be shielded from dirt, pudled, and the bike’s mechanical parts, the same as a person driving a car. And he wanted it to be the soul of simplicity, easy to build, easy to understand, and easy to repair.
To help realize his vision, Piaggio in 1945 enlisted the help of his head designer, engineer Corradino D’Ascanio, the inventor of the helicopter, who took his vast knowledge of automobile and aircraft design and narrowed its complexities down to the most basic of terms.
D’Ascanio disliked traditional motorcycles and felt that they had more defects than attributes—uncomfortable seating position, exposure to puddles and road debris, dangerous drive chain, and difficulty in repairing flat tires, among other faults. So he set out to create something that would take Paparino a giant step further along, and well away from motorcycle technology. A major part of D’Ascanio’s innovative work came from his understanding of stressed-skin body-work, used extensively in aircraft, in which the body serves double duty as an outside frame, eliminating any sort of separate supporting structure. Today, we know this as monocoque, or unibody, design, with essentially every passenger vehicle based on the concept. But in 1945, it was radical thinking.
In just three months, D’Ascanio delivered his assignment. When the engineer returned with his take on scooter design, Piaggio was impressed with the result. D’Ascanio’s scooter was smooth and aerodynamic, with an overall shape that looked strikingly modern. As Piaggio looked at the scooter’s narrow waist and wide, rounded rear aspect, and heard the buzzing of the little 98-cc engine, he remarked, “Semba una vespa,” which in Italian meant, “It seems like a wasp.” Of course, “Vespa” is the name that stuck, and remains still, all around the globe.
It became the prototype Vespa motor scooter. It was constructed without a supporting frame, instead using a sheet-metal fuselage. It has a broad shield to deflect splashes and debris from the rider, who sat upright gripping wide handlebars. The front fork was substituted with a one-sided wheel assembly and suspension much like the tail-dragger wheel of an airplane. A drive chain or drive shaft was unnecessary because the unitized engine and drive train were hidden within the bodywork of the scooter, shielding the rider from grease, dirt, and oil. D’Ascanio had taken elements of motorcycles, bicycles, automobiles, and aircraft to create something new altogether.
One obvious advantage over the motorcycle was the ease of repairing a flat tire. When motorcycle riders suffer a flat, they are stuck with the daunting job of dismantling the tire and tube from the wheel—which is difficult to remove from the bike—patching the tube and putting it all back together. It’s a dirty job that requires tools and skill. But with the Vespa design, both the front and rear wheels are identical, mounted on one-sided stub axles that allow them to be removed easily and replaced with a spare, which is carried on the back of the scooter or, in later years, behind the legshield or under the left cowl.
The prototype was introduced to the world in 1946 in the posh surroundings of the Rome Golf Club before a gathering of Italian leaders and aristocracy. Quickly, it was hailed as Italy’s first post-war innovation and recognize for its practically and usefulness. And for the first time in many years of militaristic oppression, the scooter represented something that was fun and uplifting, just as it is today.
The first run of Vespa scooter was examined and tested by skeptical journalists, who were soon won over by the scooter’s surprising attributes, despite their early negative reactions. Most impressive, the press decided, were the handling, the performance from the two-cycle engine, the ease of operation, and the fact that anyone wearing a skirt or a nice pair of dress pants could ride in comfort and arrive at his or her destination without mussed clothes.
Yes, it was immediately obvious that here was a two-wheeled vehicle that could be used by woman as practically as men. Besides its light and easy operation, the motor scooter offered its unique protective apron and floor, step-through entry, and a seat that allowed the rider to sit upright as in a chair, rather than having to straddle it like a motorcycle—a highly unladylike position in 1940s Italy, especially while wearing a dress.
Bolstered by the favorable reception, Piaggio immediately had 100 scooters made in a preliminary run. A deal was forget with Lancia, a prestigious make of automobile, to sell the first batch in its dealerships. The 100 were soon gone, and a production run of 2,500 scooters was undertaken. In all, 2,181 were sold in 1946, 10,535 in 1947, and nearly 20,000 in 1948.
Still, some critics panned the scooters as being unsafe, or noisy, or just not up to snuff. Motorcyclists and the motorcycle industry were harsh in their criticism, stating that the Vespa 8-inch wheels were dangerously unstable, that the scooter was too slow and didn’t handle well. They said was impractical for anything more than short jaunts around urban areas.
But many others loved the Vespa scooter and all that it represented. It was innovative, it was stylish, and it was affordable, all the things that poor and war-weary Italians were longing for. Piaggio weathered all complaints, confident that its new motor scooter would take the world by storm. Which it did.
Italian women were greatly affected by this new mode of transportation, giving them a taste of freedom and mobility they’d never had before. The Vespa scooter’s sophisticated, feminine form was quickly viewed as the stylish and cosmopolitan way for women to travel and be seen traveling on Roman roads. And for young men, the motor scooter became a means of both attracting young women and spiriting them away for a more private rendezvous. As they buzzed about those drab post-war city streets and country roads, the whimsically modern shape of the scooter must have seemed like bright spots of joy.
The early scooters, with their rigid rear suspensions, fender-mounted headlights, exposed engine covers and bicycle-style handlebars, are today know mainly as “rod models” because of the complex system of solid control rods that actuated the gear change. While rod bikes have plenty of appear today because of their novelty, at the time, the changeover to flexible cable in 1951 was greatly appreciated by contemporary riders. Still, 65,000 of the last run of rod-model scooters were sold during 1950.
The earliest models had no provision to cool the engine, despite its confined location. In 1948, the air-cooled engine was kept from overheating by cleverly incorporating a fan attached to the flywheel that forced air over the cylinder’s cooling fins, a design that remains to this day.
And so began Vespa motorscooter’s rapid rise in popularity that very quickly encompassed the entire world, eventually being produced in 13 different nations and totaling more than 15 million scooters sold in more than 50 years of production. Piaggio’s Scooters are still being made in plants in Italy, Germany, France, Japan, India, and other Asian nations. The Asian scooters being built today are not very different from the Vespa models made during the 1970s.
Piaggio’s only serious competition arose in 1947, when the Innocenti corporation began producing its Lambretta, outwardly similar but fundamentally different from the Vespa design. Where the Vespa scooter had a stressed-steel structure, Lambretta used a backbone frame. The suspension, drivelines, and most other details were also different. Most significantly, it was the Vespa design that became the archetypal scooter, identified as such around the world, while Lambretta always ran a distant second, until its last scooter in 1971.
