Peter Moore in Menaggio with his 1961 classic Vespa, Sophia. Photo: Peter More / petermoore.net
It first appeared in the Lonely Planet anthology, Flightless. It recounts the summer the author turned 40, bought a Vespa as old as he was and rode it from Milan to Rome – a trip that took him through medieval stone towns, patch-worked fields and into the hearts of all the Italians he met.
I’ve just handed over €1,200 for a 40-year-old Vespa that may or may not work. I’m sitting at a pavement café having lunch with the man I’ve bought it from. His name is Gianni and he looks like Derek Jacobi in Gladiator.
I’m in Italy following a boyhood dream. As a teenager with lank hair and a wardrobe full of flannel shirts I swore that one day I’d go to Italy, buy a Vespa and be as cool as Marcello Mastroianni in La Dolce Vita. This summer I turn 40 and I’m finally doing it.
I found the Vespa advertised on eBay. It is a coffee-coloured 1961 model with saddle seats and a little too much chrome. It was exactly what I was looking for: a Vespa as old as I am and in the same condition – a little rough around the edges but going OK.
As motor scooters buzz past in manic packs, Gianni is teaching me everything I need to know to ride this one from Milan to Rome. Petrol stations close between noon and 3pm. Old Vespas are restricted to B-roads. The Italian word for a slice of Parma ham is fetta. I can ignore metropolitan police but never the carabinieri. Most importantly, my safe passage on this quest depends entirely on mastering a simple hand signal and the pronunciation of the word vaffanculo.
I point to a cluster of Vespas parked on the pavement and ask if it is legal to park like that. Gianni finishes a mouthful of carpaccio and looks me directly in the eyes. There is the law,’ he says sagely. ‘And there is intelligence.’ I’ve bought a Vespa from the Italian Yoda
One week down and I still haven’t seen any sign of the intelligence Gianni spoke of. I’ve seen Vespa riders going the wrong way up one-way streets. I’ve witnessed them bearing down on people crossing streets as if intent on hitting them. And I’ve watched them mount the pavement to get around a momentary traffic jam, scattering pedestrians and dogs in the process.
Just this morning I saw a scooter rider laying on his back on the street after being knocked off his bike. He continued talking on his mobile phone as the paramedics attached a brace to his back.
Gianni’s idea that I ride north to Lake Como before heading south to Rome was a good one, though. He hasn’t ridden this Vespa for over four years. A quick jaunt around the lake will reveal any problems while I’m still close enough to Milan for him to fix them.
I have learnt two things up here on the lake: riding a Vespa is the perfect way to get around Italy (nippy, exhilarating and small enough to wheel on to a ferry), and I need a new intake valve on the carburetor.
I am 70 kilometres south of Milan and drinking spumante in the restaurant attached to a modest hotel. Broni, it seems, is the heart of one of Italy’s premier spumante producing regions.
The manager’s wife is astounded that I am Australian – even more so when I tell her my plan to ride to Rome. When she discovers my journey is inspired by old black-and-white Italian movies she insists I name my Vespa after Sophia Loren. I am on my third glass of spumante and readily agree.
Sophia the Vespa already shows many of the same characteristics as her celluloid namesake. When I try to start her in the morning she does so with the reluctance of a movie star happily dozing in bed. She will only stir after I give her a little choke, the motor-scooter equivalent of a shot of espresso. And when she finally emerges into the light, she looks dropdead gorgeous. No matter what angle you look at her from.
When Sophia breaks down, good things happen. I am spending the night in a luxurious hunting lodge atop the rolling hills behind Ponte dell’Olio because Sophia has decided she doesn’t want to go any further.
Most importantly, my safe passage on this quest depends entirely on mastering a simple hand signal and the pronunciation of the word, vaffanculo.
The manager of the Locanda Cacciatori is a romantic at heart. He has decided that a quest as foolhardy – and so obviously Italian – as riding a 40-year-old Vespa to Rome needs encouraging. For only €40 he has given me a room with views over patchwork fields and carte blanche to eat whatever I want from the lodge’s highly regarded restaurant.
His friend, a mechanic, is replacing Sophia’s points, in the morning.
I am high in the Apennines, the mountain range that separates the regions of Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany. Sophia has spluttered to a stop again. I am surrounded by empty mountains and enveloped in silence. There are no houses, only wildflowers; no passing vehicles, only birds. Sure, it is lovely. But I haven’t seen the upside yet.
I take Sophia’s cowl off and start tinkering with her engine. I pretend I know what I am doing. I go through a series of mechanical gestures like removing the spark plug and cleaning it. They are more talismanic than useful.
I look up and see an old man with a walking cane and a flat cap hobbling towards me. The nearest town, Bobbio, is 12 kilometers back. His demeanor suggests he is on his morning constitutional. He stops beside Sophia and silently hands me his cap and his cane. He siphons petrol from the tank and pours it directly into the carburetor. He kicks the starter pedal with his gammy leg and Sophia springs immediately to life.
He takes back his cap and cane and hobbles on.
I walk into the historical centre of Vernazza and feel like I have stepped on to an Italian film set in the 1950s. A single path runs from the top of the town to the sea. It is lined by four-storey houses painted in faded shades of yellow, terracotta and salmon. Colourful wooden fishing boats jostle in a small harbour, which is crowned on one side by the remains of a castle and a 14th-century church on the other.
It is Sophia’s kind of town, a labyrinth of tiny lanes and cobbled alleyways. But she is chained to a light pole in a car park at the top of the town. On this stretch of the Ligurian coast, in the five villages that give it its name, all motor vehicles are banned.
Without Sophia I am a tourist again. I eat trenette alla pesto, a local specialty, and the waiter short-changes me. I drink a beer in the bar overlooking the crystal sea and I am charged the half-litre price even though I am drinking from a 300ml glass. I catch shopkeepers resting their thumbs on scales as I buy slices of Parma ham and fresh tomatoes for a picnic lunch.
On Sophia I am given extra portions and generous discounts. I hadn’t realized how much she has been saving me.
Livorno is a port town surrounded by unlovely warehouses and chimney stacks. I decide it is my favourite place in Italy so far.
Livorno is home to Filippo and Marco. Filippo is known on the internet as The Waspmaster. He was the one who pointed me towards Sophia’s listing on eBay, when I emailed him for advice. His friend Marco restores Vespas and has the cleanest workshop on the planet.
Filippo and Marco are showing me around Livorno. I have eaten squid-ink risotto. I have drunk ponce, a local drink made from rough rum, at Bar Civili. I have puttered around the ancient canals in a motorboat at midnight watching the tarponi, giant rats, swimming back to their sewers after feasting on the market litter.
Did I tell you I have drunk ponce, a local drink made from rough rum, at Bar Civili?
Maybe that’s why I keep waking up on the sofa in Marco’s workshop rather than the hotel room that I’ve paid for but never end up using.
Tonight is the Sagra del Pinolo, the Feast of the Pine Nut. I am buzzing along the Art Deco boulevards of Terrenia with Marco, Filippo and a local artist called Francesco. We are all riding Vespas or Lambrettas. It feels like I am living in an episode of The Many Lives of Doby Gillis.
We leave the coast and ride along a road lined by heavily scented pine trees until we reach San Piero a Grado, one of the oldest churches in Italy. The fields that surround it have been transformed into a crowded carnival celebrating everything pine nut.
Over a meal of spaghetti al pinolo and steak barbequed over pine cones, I learn that people from Lucca call the shapely cowls of a Vespa polmoni (lungs). In Livorno, they call them puppe, slang for breasts. In Rome, they call them chiappe, buttocks. The term the Romans use makes most sense to me.
I also discover that I have chosen the wrong saint to watch over Sophia. Before I left Sydney, I bought a Mary, mother of God, fridge magnet to do the job.
‘Mary is too tired,’ says Marco. ‘She has been worn out by centuries of requests.’
‘You need a new saint,’ says Filippo. ‘Someone fresh off the bench with energy to burn.’
‘Like Padre Pio,’ says Francesco. ‘He was only just canonised. He still has much strength.’
I buy a freshly minted Padre Pio fridge magnet from a stall at the carnival. I ride back to Livorno with the smell of the sea in my nostril and the undeniable feeling that Sophia is riding much, much more smoothly.
I have decided that the patchworked hills in this part of Tuscany were created by God for the sole purpose of riding a Vespa through them. I can smell the freshly cut hay. I can feel the warm sun on my skin. The tiny 125cc engine sounds like a wasp floating on a summer breeze.
On the road back to the medieval hilltop towers of San Gimignano I pass a group of redfaced English people on a cycle tour of Tuscany. They are slugging back water and summoning up the energy for one last hill. At the gates I spot a pair of Dutch bikers on Ducatis, peeling off gluggy sweat-soaked leathers. I understand why both have chosen to see Tuscany the way they have. Cycling offers intimacy with the landscape. Motorcycling the thrills of traversing winding and dipping roads.
Sophia offers me the benefits of both.
The golden stone walls of Siena are surrounded by car parks. It is summer and they are packed with mobile homes and cars with English, Dutch and German number plates.
The hotels are full too. I ride to a kiosk near the Stadio Comunale, just outside the walls, where the local tourist board offers a room finding service. I park Sophia next to a group of other Vespas and join the long queue. The young guy serving beckons me to the front.
‘That is my Vespa there,’ he says pointing to the PX parked next to Sophia. He asks me why I am riding an old Vespa and I tell him.
‘You are the kind of tourist we want,’ he says, quickly finding me a room. ‘If I didn’t have to serve these people we could ride together.’
As the sun sets I ride Sophia into the heart of old Siena. Cars are banned from this part of the town but on Sophia I can go anywhere I please. I bounce along the cobbled streets, weaving through tourists and around baskets of pasta and bottles of olive oil. I park Sophia with a clump of other Vespas on Il Campo, the famous central square.
I sit in front of the square’s palazzi to soak up the atmosphere. The tour groups are gone and the day-trippers are returning to their vehicles before they are impounded. Soon it is only me, a band playing to a handful of restaurant patrons and some of feral travellers playing bongos and washing in the 19th-century replica of the medieval Gaia fountain.
It strikes me that the ferals have the freedom to go wherever they want, too. It’s just that my way doesn’t involving getting chased out of town by angry shopkeepers and pissed-off carabinieri.
I discover early in my trip that the drop between the hook under Sophia’s front seat and the running boards where I rest my feet is the exact same length as a plastic carrier bag. The discovery transforms my trip. I start every day buying provisions for a picnic somewhere suitably picturesque en route.
This morning I am in Massa Marittima, an ancient mining town that sits high in the Colline Metallifere, looking out across the bleak plains of southern Tuscany. The metalbearing hills provided the town with much of its wealth during the 12th century, funding the building of the cathedral, Palazzo Comunale and other impressive buildings surrounding Piazza Garibaldi.
I visit Casa della Frutta to buy fruit and salad. The woman who serves me gives me an impromptu Italian lesson, slowly pronouncing the name of each item as she puts it on the scale.
At Panificio Romano the baker suggests the panine frustini Geovesi, a Genovese-style bread he sells at €3.62 a kilo. At Il Salumeria I dodge the different coloured and shaped pasta hanging in clear cellophane bags to pick up some bocconcini cheese, olives and local wildboar ham. I finish with a cappuccino and a bombolone (doughnut) overlooking the square.
As I leave Massa Marrittima, cutting across the piazza with my provision dangling beneath the seat, a hearse pulls up in front of the cathedral. The church bells toll three sad notes – up, up, down – and two nuns scurry down the stone stairs to comfort the mourners as they emerge.
I ride past, an Australian on a 40-year-old Vespa. A photographer, attending a conference in town that’s sponsored by Kodak, takes a photo. I am just another element in his carefully constructed scene.
It is only 50 kilometres until I reach Rome. I’ve just taken a stiff shot of espresso in a café with a marble bar and coffee machine with more chrome than a ’57 Chevy. I return to Sophia and find an old lady standing beside her and weeping.
Her daughter translates, ‘She says it is the Vespa of her youth.’
In Menaggio, Sophia reminded the local librarian of the time he courted his wife with hands covered in Vespa engine oil. In Castell’Arquato a barman reminisced about his childhood, when his whole family rode on a Vespa to the nearest village every Sunday. Upon reaching it had decide whether to buy pizza or petrol. If they chose pizza, his dad had to push the Vespa home.
I return to Sophia and find an old lady standing beside her and weeping. Her daughter translates, ‘She says it is the Vespa of her youth.’
In Italy, everyone has a Vespa story.
Sophia has her own tale too. Her first owner her first bought her especially to woo a girl. He had an extra saddle seat fitted so she would be comfortable throughout their long courtship. And he had fitted her with all the available accessories to prove to his prospective father-in-law that he was a man of means. When the couple finally wed, Sophia was draped in ribbons and used as the wedding vehicle.
Back in Sutri the old lady brushes away her tears and waves as I ride off. And she smiles. For a moment she is young again, her lustrous hair under a headscarf as she rattles along on her Vespa, flirting with the boys and bursting with brio for what lay ahead.
I have a favourite ‘circuit’ in Rome. I sweep around the Vittorio Emmanuel monument and buzz up Via dei Fori Imperiali like Charlton Heston on a chariot in Ben-Hur. Trajan’s Market is on my left, the Forum on my right; ahead, the Colosseum. I slingshot around it, rattle back along the cobbled back streets and start all over again.
It is three months since I set out from Milan and I am finally in Rome. A plane would have taken an hour to do the journey; a train, maybe eight; a car, a little longer. But it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as much fun.
My girlfriend Sally has joined me. We rattle around the city pretending we are in Roman Holiday (she is the perfect Audrey Hepburn; I am a decidedly low-rent Gregory Peck). We weave our way through the throngs to the Trevi Fountain. She tosses a coin in but refuses to tell me what she wishes for.
Sally says I’ve changed in three months. Now I can see the intelligence in driving up a one-way street to cut three minutes off a journey. I’ll ride on the inside, outside and anywhere between cars to get where I want to go. And I love jockeying at the lights with other scooter riders and buzzing off just before the light turns green.
We spend Sally’s last night in Rome’s liveliest quarter, Trastevere. Its tightly knit lanes overflow with pavement cafés and restaurants. It is the closest thing to the lively nightspots featured in La Dolce Vita. I park Sophia with a flock of other Vespas beside the Santa Maria church and we plunge in, holding hands, to be washed along by the quarter’s crackling brio.
We return to our hotel along Via Nazionale. I buzz around the roundabout at Piazza della Repubblica and into a restricted traffic zone. A policewoman standing on the corner spots me and blows her whistle. I notice from her uniform that she works for the metropolitan police. It is a branch of the police force that Gianni told me I could ignore. I wave and keep going. She shrugs her shoulders and allows me to pass.
I can’t help but grin. I’m not a Vespa virgin anymore …. Fin
Written and indicated photographes by Peter Moore
About the author:
Peter Moore is Australia’s best-loved travel author. His first book, No Shitting in the Toilet, quickly became a backpacker classic. His second, The Wrong Way Home, is regarded as ‘must-read’ for those considering taking the overland route from London to Sydney. And Vroom with a View, the book on which this one is based, captures the unbridled joy of jumping on a Vespa and riding around Italy.
His other books include The Full Montezuma (travelling around Central America with the Girl Next Door), Swahili for the Broken-Hearted (Cape Town to Cairo by any means possible), Same Same But Different (the Mekong Delta on a ’64 Vespa) and Vroom by the Sea (the sunny parts of Italy on a bright orange Vespa).
Connect with Peter online:
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