If you're in the Eternal City, expect to hear the eternal buzz of motor scooters.
The general area of Rome has four million people and half a million scooters and motorbikes. Having pledged in early May to leave the car at home and do my Toronto travel by scooter, I am now investigating one of the great scooter cities of the world.
As I climb on my little 50-cc scooter and head toward Via Veneto, I am engulfed in a travelling swarm of fellow scooterists. As I cross Ponte Vittorio toward Saint Peter's, scooter after scooter speeds past me.
When I'm looking for the route to Ostia and its ancient harbour and sandy beaches, I simply join the steady stream of scooters leaving the city eastbound.
The history, the culture and the pleasures of Rome are well known. It was the capital of the longest-lasting empire of classical Western civilization. But forget the chariot; explore it by scooter.
As the 8-to-1 ratio of people to scooters suggests, nearly every Roman family must own one. In Canada, a scooter is useless in the ice-bound months; however, a Canadian summer is no different than a Roman summer, and it's hard to imagine that Rome could function at all if the half-million scooters turned into half a million cars to clog the already crowded streets.
It's a mind-set issue. In Toronto, rich lawyers and bankers want to be seen as they arrive in their eight-cylinder beauties; in Rome, everyone seems to realize that it's faster, easier and cheaper to get there on a scooter.
Canadians drive their cars, trucks and SUVs every day in situations where motor scooters would be a better choice. You don't want to drive from Toronto to Vancouver on one of these, but for taking short trips, commuting to work or to the subway, two-wheeled transportation makes sense.
Think about the reduction in gasoline burned and the reduction of air pollutants and then think about the free parking.
In Rome, I did as the Romans and scootered my way everywhere. Many streets are cobblestone, very uneven cobblestone, and the little scooter wheels make for a rough ride. But Romans manage the bumps and potholes.
In Italy, about 400,000 scooters a year are sold and the majority of them are manufactured by Piaggio, the maker of Vespa among other brands. I headed north to Florence by train to check out the Italian scooter conglomerate.
The factory is in Pontedera. During the Second World War, it built four-engine bombers for the Hitler-Mussolini Axis and was in turn bombed flat by the Allies, putting it out of the aircraft business for good.
In 1946, it built its first scooter, the buzzing Vespa, which is Italian for wasp. It was the right product at the right time and 17 million Vespas have now been produced here. While the Vespas of today still have the classic lines of the 1946 version, they certainly are nothing like them under the surface.
The early models had single-cylinder, two-stroke engines, which were noisy, oily and smelly. In fact, Vespas had to be pulled off the market in North America for 20 years beginning in the early 1980s when they couldn't meet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's strengthened emission laws.
Piaggio eventually changed its product and Vespa scooters now meet today's emission standards. They still have one-cylinder engines, but the new ones are liquid-cooled with electronic fuel injection systems and four-valve technology coupled with a continuously variable transmission.
Three years ago, Piaggio was on the brink of collapse after decades of mismanagement, a failed venture in China, and severe competition by much-larger Asian firms like Yamaha and Honda. But in October, 2003, Italian entrepreneur Roberto Colaninno stepped in and began a turnaround that led to a successful initial public offering this year.
