ROME — 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.
There's nothing more Italian than getting about on a Piaggio Vespa scooter. (AP)
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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.
He modernized production facilities so that any scooter could be produced on any assembly line. He brought Italian unions on board by promising not to cut jobs, and product engineers were given firm deadlines.
Piaggio is a changed company today that operates globally in what they call the light-mobility vehicles industry. It leads the European market for two-wheeled vehicles and also builds tiny three- and four-wheel vehicles that will never see North America.
The company owns a number of brands, including Vespa, Derbi, Gilera, Aprilia and Moto Guzzi. It manufactures scooters that range from 50-cc urban lightweights to 500-cc highway cruisers that do 155 km/h. Piaggio's challenge now is growth and it's targeting markets including India, China and North America.
In the U.S., with its car-dominated cities, Piaggio's game plan is to work with mayors and transportation experts to increase scooter-friendly city features, notably parking.
After U.S. President George W. Bush's State of the Union quip about the U.S. addiction to oil, Paolo Timoni, chief executive officer of the Piaggio Group North America, wrote an open letter to the nation's mayors urging them to look to scooters as a solution to energy and transportation woes.
"If Americans were to utilize one of the latest eco-friendly models available today, they could, in aggregate, reduce national fuel consumption by 14 million gallons of gasoline a day and reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 324 million pounds per day," the letter read.
In Canada, the marketing approach has put more emphasis on the "joy" of scootering, which is something that is well understood in Italy.
I drove my Vespa GTS250 into the hills of Tuscany down the famous Chianti Route, Strada Principale 222, which runs from Florence to Sienna. The GTS250's retro styling is Italian design at its finest — rounded and chromed in all the right places.
Scooters feel slightly top-heavy compared with motorcycles, but this one went up and down the hills effortlessly while I took it easy on the switchback turns.
I steered toward the Castello di Verrazzano, located on a hilltop in the Chianti Classico. The Verrazzano family began making wine here in the seventh century. Giovanni Verrazzano, who was born here in 1485, went on to explore the east coast of America and to discover the bay of New York. The Verrazzano Bridge, the one crossed in the New York City Marathon, is named after him.
I had lunch with Gino Rosi, who runs the wine-tasting and tour activities, and the conversation quickly turned to Vespas. "Vespa is special; it is like wine," Rosi said. "I have driven Vespa all my life. The modern Vespas are descendants of the original ones that I drove like crazy through the streets of [Florence]. But that's a memory. Today, the Vespas are sophisticated with automatic transmission. But today life's easier and the wine is smoother, too. Let's accept what is new."
He had me follow him past the cellars and into a building connected to the castle itself. In it was a private room where the proprietor kept his personal 1956 Vespa. Two kicks on the starter pedal and it roared to life and buzzed like a wasp.
Will scooters ever make a breakthrough to become accepted as useful, although seasonal, transportation in Toronto? One indication is that while motorcycle sales are in decline again, scooter sales are growing. But it's all relative; a few thousand extra units is big news to Canadian scooter distributors.
Perhaps our northern identity prevents us from accepting the scooter as a part of urban life. But look at the globe. Florence, Tuscany and Toronto are equally north — both situated at 43 degrees longitude. The buzzing of "wasps" might become familiar to Toronto's ears, too.
