Vespas - Quotes

http://nickzinger.com/vespas-are-cool/57

I got my Vespa last year, and I love it. Not only are they great on gas, easy and fun to drive, but they are just so damn steezy. I stumbled on the nicest Vespa I have ever seen from a link at QBN. Fully functional, wooden Vespa!



http://whoridesavespa.com/2007/11/26/vespa-spotting-sunday-sitti-ride/

Locally, the cult of the Vespa has experienced a growth spurt in recent years, fueled by the entry of the modern Vespas and the continued fetishization of the vintage ones. Local aficionados bond together through organized group rides, the annual Vespa Attack scooter rally, and through internet forums such as Vespinoy.com and Euroscoot.net. Last year, the Vespa Club of the Philippines was organized. It recently launched its own internet forum as well.

Vespa enthusiasts form a subset of the emerging Pinoy scooter culture. Spiralling fuel costs and worsening traffic congestion, together with the introduction of inexpensive “underbone” scooters available on installment have seen two-wheeled vehicle sales go through the roof (together with a corresponding increase in road accidents). Granted, Vespa aficionados tend to be older, better educated and financially better off than the typical underbone enthusiast (the modern Vespas costing many times more than the average Japanese or Chinese scoot). But for both, their rides signify the same things as the first Vespas did for their owners: a means of freedom, mobility, and self-expression.




http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2005/apr/24/italy.observerescapesection

"I've long had a theory that Vespas are a bit like Italians. They are noisy and inconsiderate yet fun to be around. They are impractical and temperamental yet effortlessly stylish. A mix of things that shouldn't work but somehow do. So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when a 1961 Vespa proved to be the perfect host as I spent a summer travelling from Milan to Rome in this maddening, invigorating country.

The idea to ride around Italy on a Vespa first came to me as a teenager growing up in Australia. Sydney wasn't the lively, cosmopolitan city back then that it is today. Dinner was meat and two veg and Sunday afternoon television consisted of Laurel and Hardy re-runs. Occasionally a dilettante at the television station would run an old black and white Italian movie like La Dolce Vita - or a Hollywood one like Roman Holiday - and we'd have lasagne. On those days I'd get a glimpse of another world on our flickering TV set. It was a place where all a guy had to do to look cool was jump on a Vespa and buzz down to a cafe where a clutch of glamorous women with big, pointy and slightly dangerous-looking breasts would flirt with him.

For a young bloke with greasy hair and still wearing flannelette shirts this was quite a revelation. If I wanted to go anywhere I had to ask my dad to give me a lift to the train station. And when I got there the girls chewing gum and wearing boob tubes would totally ignore me. I'd sit on the train into town replaying those movies in my mind so that it was me riding around the countryside drinking espresso and flirting with women with curvaceous figures and dark, burning eyes, not Marcello Mastroianni. One day, I promised myself, I'd live the dolce vita, the sweet life, like Marcello, in a sharp suit and Ray-Bans.

The summer I turned 40 I found a vintage Vespa I liked the look of on eBay Italy and decided to make my dream a reality. The Vespa was a pale coffee colour and as old as me, with two saddle seats and a chrome crash bar that ran along each side, protecting its voluptuous curves. In true Italian fashion I bought it on a whim without realising that it was impossible for a foreigner to own or register a vintage motorcycle in Italy. All I knew was that I'd found a Vespa exactly like the one I had wanted to ride around Italy on as a teenager.

It should have ended in tears then and there. According to the rules of eBay I had seven days to send €1,200 to a man in Milan for a bike I'd never seen that I couldn't legally own. But Gianni, the bike's owner, answered my feverishly concerned emails about rules and regulations with Latin nonchalance. I could pay him when I arrived in Milan. Indeed, if I didn't like the bike I could walk away from the deal. As for riding it around Italy, I could keep it registered in his name until I was ready to export it.

What had appeared to my Anglo Saxon mind as an insurmountable wall of bureaucratic red tape was regarded as an intriguing obstacle to be circumvented by Gianni's more Latin mindset.

'There is the law and there is intelligence,' he said sagely. And when it looked like it would take six weeks to get a particular piece of paperwork from the Italian DVLA he promised the woman behind the counter that he'd take her for pizza e vino in a romantic bar on a cobbled street in Milan and it was issued immediately.

I spent three months riding from Milan to Rome, lingering on the Ligurian coast before criss-crossing the fields of Tuscany to the ancient capital. Because my Vespa was only 125cc I wasn't allowed on motorways and had to take the B-roads instead. It was a world of stone villas and roads lined with cypress pines and more often than not I'd find myself riding through fields of stunning yellow sunflowers so bright and cheerful-looking that I couldn't help but smile. At other times I'd wind my way up to Medieval hilltop towns and park on cobbled main squares while cars full of tourists remained stuck in the massive carparks outside. I could feel the sun on my skin, smell the freshly cut lucerne. Even the reng-deng-deng of the two-stroke engine seemed right. Travelling through the Italian countryside I came to think of the sound of my Vespa's engine as the amplified buzzing of a summer wasp.

It was the simple little things about my Vespa that made it so perfect for the trip. Like the bag-holding hook under the front seat. I bought provisions every morning as I left a town, hung the bags from the hook and then stopped for a picnic lunch somewhere suitably picturesque.

Buying the provisions for those picnics became an integral part of my journey too. The morning I left Massa Marittima, an old mining town high in the Colline Metallifere, was typical of my daily routine. I visited the Casa della Frutta, the house of fruit, and the woman serving gave me an impromptu Italian lesson by slowly pronouncing the name of each item as she put them on the scale. At Panifica Romano the baker suggested the panini frusti Genovesi, a Genoese style bread that he sold by weight at €3.62 a kilo. At Il Salumiere, I dodged the different shaped pastas in clear cellophane packets tied with ribbon hanging from the door, and picked up some boconcini, olives and local wild boar ham. It would have been quicker and more convenient to visit the Co-op supermarket on the outskirts of town but it wouldn't have been half as much fun.

I finished my shopping trip with a cappuccino (it was before 10am so I could drink it without causing offence) and a bombolone at a cafe on Piazza Garibaldi. I added lots of sugar to the coffee to match the sweetness of the custard-filled doughnut, and watched a black hearse pull into the square and stop outside the cathedral. The church bells tolled three sad notes - up, up, down - and everyone in the town stopped and stood still in silent respect as the coffin was carried into the church. A couple of nuns hung outside in black, looking like ravens, ready to comfort the mourners. They spotted a group of old ladies sobbing and swooped in, holding their hands and kissing their wet cheeks. When I rode past on my Vespa, the bags of food swinging from the under-seat hook, I was a natural part of the scene, not an interloper.

Indeed, everywhere I went on my Vespa I was greeted as an old friend. In Broni a farmer insisted on showing me an old Vespa rotting in his shed, before sharing a simple meal of ham and wine with me in his modest farmhouse. In Massa Marittima the local garbage man said he was full of ' stupefatto ' - amazement - when he saw my old Vespa and offered to get his Rally 200 scooter and show me the hidden corners of this part of Italy. Marco, a Vespa restorer I met in the port town of Livorno, insisted on taking me to Bar Civili, an institution he grandly claimed was the 'most famous ponce bar in the world'.

Ponce is a Livornese drink made of rum, coffee and sugar and finished with a piece of lemon peel. Ponce is a mispronunciation of the English word 'punch', and was an attempt to make the Royal Navy rum brought into the port by English sailors more palatable. Marco was quite a connoisseur of the stuff. He explained that the rum was from the Antilles and because it was rough and strong the Livornese added coffee and sugar.

The Civili was equally steeped in history. Tucked away among blocks of faded and worn apartments near the railway station, it has been a self-proclaimed 'bar, meeting place, institution and temple to continuity' for over 100 years. It was small and cosy, with arches and wooden beams that appeared lower than they were because of all the football pennants stuck to them.

The bar attracted a mixed crowd. Cool girls with bindis sipped on Persiana, a startling green drink named after the colour of Livorno's window shutters, while old guys in cloth caps sat at tables knocking back beer and soda, another Livornese beverage. Elsewhere a group of thirtysomething men were playing cards. At the bar, a salty old sea captain, looking like something out of a Robert Louis Stevenson novel, was knocking back ponce like he was about to go to sea for a decade or two. With a wave of his hand Marco ordered three more and we joined the old sea dog at the bar. The ponce he ordered had a small piece of lemon skin floating in it and was called ponce a vela.

' Vela means with a sailor,' he explained. 'The Livornese used to think the skin of the lemon looked like the skin of a sailor.'

I knocked it back and declared it a very fine drink, making nearly as many friends with that one comment as I did by riding a Vespa.

It helped that I was riding an old Vespa. The Italian government has a policy of rotamazione, paying people €1,000 to crush their old bikes to meet EU emission levels, so there are very few vintage Vespas left on the road. Mechanics fixed my Vespa for free, happy to keep a little piece of Italian heritage going. Hotel managers gave me their best rooms and discount rates. Farmers tilling fields looked up to watch me pass. And I lost count of the number of times people on other scooters rode beside me smiling broadly and asking me questions in Italian.

I had underestimated how dearly Italians hold Vespas. Those simple elegant lines are part of their DNA. For older generations the Vespa was the cheap family vehicle that helped the country get back on its feet after the Second World War. To teenagers in the 60s and 70s it was a cheap and stylish ticket to freedom. Even today the release of a new model is a subject of debate, with people from all walks of life having an opinion on whether the Vespa spirit has been retained.

I quickly discovered that every Italian has a Vespa story and every Vespa has one too. Mine was originally bought by a young man to court his future wife. The chrome accessories that I loved so much had been fitted not to look flash but rather to impress upon his future father-in-law that he was a man of means.

I met another chap whose family used to pile on the family Vespa every Sunday and go to the local village. When they got there they had to decide on buying petrol or pizza. If it was pizza, his father had to push the Vespa home. When I stopped for coffee near Rome I returned to find a middle-aged woman standing beside my Vespa crying.

'It is the Vespa of her youth,' her daughter explained.

My journey through Italy on a vintage Vespa ended in Rome on a weekend with my girlfriend Sally and I pretending we were in Roman Holiday, the movie that featured Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck buzzing around Rome on a metallic green Vespa 125. Sally had flown over from London and, to her credit, did a pretty good impression of Audrey Hepburn. But sadly, I was a decidedly low-rent Gregory Peck. It did highlight one thing though. The joy of riding a Vespa, like the joy of visiting Italy, is one that is meant to be shared.

Corradino D'Ascanio had this in mind when he designed the Vespa. When I first set eyes on my Vespa in Milan, Gianni told me that the reason the engine was at the back of the bike on the right-hand side was to counter balance the weight of the legs of female passengers riding side-saddle dangling on the other.

It was a message that Piaggio were not backward in promoting. Advertising for Vespas initially emphasised the bike's affordability and highlighted the company's radical easy payment plan. But as post-war Europe became more affluent the message changed. Vespa posters started showing young and happy couples doing romantic and exciting things while straddling their ever faithful Vespa. Once the domain of families who clambered aboard six at a time, Vespas were now for lovers.

Him, her and the Vespa. It was a bizarre love triangle that Piaggio encouraged by producing a series of postcards for lovers and sweethearts to send each other from all over Europe. They depicted couples in romantic situations on their Vespas and while they appear twee today they were phenomenally popular back then. A card featuring a suave young couple parked beside the running track at the empty Olympic stadium in Rome, for example, was one of the most sent postcards in Italy in 1964. I must admit I did have a series of Vespa postcard-type snapshots in my mind that I hoped to play out while Sally visited. In them Sally always wore a scarf and cats-eyes sunglasses and I, bizarrely, had the ability to play the double bass.

My little old Vespa proved to be the perfect guide to the Eternal City. The weekend passed like a movie directed by William Wyler, a slide show of Roman sights from the back of a buzzing old Vespa. We zipped up tiny lanes with wash ing strung between them, past the craftsmen on Via dell'Orso repairing chandeliers and making gilt frames and right up to the door of ancient monuments. When we ate lunch in a cafe overlooking the Pantheon, I was able to park my Vespa with a group of other scooters only metres away.

That night we ate in Trastevere. With its lively crowds, cafes and restaurants and kiosks selling slices of watermelon and grattachecca - flavoured ice - it had that brio, that liveliness that jumped off the screen and shook me as a 15-year-old boy watching old movies. We ended the evening back at Trevi Fountain. Sally loved the movie Three Coins in the Fountain and wanted to see the world-famous fountain it featured.

'You've never lived until you've loved in Rome!' she said, quoting the movie's tag line with a grin.

A pack of scousers on a stag night jumped into the fountain and made like Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita. One of the guys, a large chap, even had breasts to rival Anita's.

As we left I tossed a coin and made a wish. Tradition states that if you throw one coin in you'll return to Rome. Two and you'll fall in love with an Italian. Sally teased me by challenging me to throw in another coin after the first but I told her I didn't have to, I was already in love with an Ital ian. She was a fading beauty that I'd met on the internet and I'd just spent a magical three months with her picnicking beside fields of sunflowers, wandering through medieval hilltop towns and listening to old Dean Martin records. Thanks to her I'd seen a side of her country that I wouldn't have otherwise seen.

It was just too bad she was a motor scooter."