Birth and History of an object of desire.Omar Calabrese
What a lovely name the Vespa has! No one really knows how it came to be named. It is said that during the experimental stage the prototype of what would become the most famous scooter in the world was called Paperino, Italian for Donald Duck. But company lore would have it that when Enrico Piaggio saw the definitive model which Corradino D'Ascanio showed him after having modified it to the entrepreneur's specifications, he exclaimed: "It looks like a wasp!" And wasp - Vespa - it became. Never was a product's name more appropriate. The wasp is in fact a likeable enough insect - individualistic, independent and Nature-loving, even if it can be dangerous and has no real use, not being capable of producing honey. It moves quickly, without stopping, more or less everywhere, interpreting the etymology of the word "scooter", which comes from the verb scoot, meaning "to move swiftly; to go suddenly and speedily". This nomenclature was, among other things, extremely lucky. It was a common noun which became a proper noun, the name of a vehicle, but then returned to being a common noun - in fact one says "the Vespa", but also "a Vespa", sometimes used generically to describe vehicles not produced by Piaggio. I believe that in product history a similar process took place with aspirin. Like any lucky name, the Vespa has given birth to a "family". Another three Piaggio vehicles are called respectively Ape (bee), Moscone (bluebottle) and Grillo (cricket) - all insect names, to follow up on the idea of a small engine with a buzz that flies anywhere and everywhere. But these vehicles also had a decreasing order of success. The Ape, the worker vehicle, did well, though its name had to be changed in English-speaking countries where it was re-baptised Vespacar or, in South Africa, Bromponie. The Moscone, "the seaside Vespa", was moderately successful, while history largely ignores the Grillo. But then the destiny of a masterpiece is to remain unique notwithstanding copies. The strength of the name transferred itself to all the communication of our scooter. The1950s slogan "Vespizzatevi!" (Vespa yourselves!), a linguistic innovation (somewhat like "Vote socialist" or "Walk Pirelli") in that it creates a verb from a proper noun, is still part of the common memory. But the famous "Chi Vespa mangia le mele" (roughly "those who Vespa eat the apple") of the late 1960s is also an example of transformation of the Italian language. In this case the change creates a surprising ambiguity between a hypothetical "to vespa" and the ellipsis of the verb "have" ("those who (have) Vespa…. "). In the Seventies the Vespa goes as far as renaming its rivals the "sardomobili" or "commuter sardines", a bold coinage that put sardines and cars together to indicate (in one word in the original Italian) the terrible degeneration of urban traffic. The Vespa undeniably forms part of Italian history. It was born in 1946 and immediately proved itself the best possible strategy for reconstruction. Enrico Piaggio owned a company that had been destroyed by the war and that was totally unequipped for peacetime. During the war it had produced helicopters, aircraft, industrial vehicles for military use and even arms. Earlier it had produced trains, rail wagons and ships. Its prospects in a country with a non-existent economy were slim. The Vespa was hence a real find. It was a vehicle for town travel or even for small trips. It was the cheap individual solution to a mobility problem that couldn't be solved through the usual mass transport. It was a miniature of the motorised possession represented elsewhere by the commercial vehicle. All in all, it was what we might call "Italy's Ford." Hence it quickly became a myth: a worker's myth, but also one of purchase, of families, of young couples, a myth of freedom within a hardworking and optimistic society. The myth carried on expanding in succeeding periods such as that of the economic boom or the generational change of the 1960s. In fact everything seemed to already be written into the product's specifications. The boom saw the multiplication of models in tens of versions, from the most basic to the plushest. Automobile sales, on the increase in those years thanks to the Seicento and Cinquecento (Fiat's Six Hundred and Five Hundred respectively) promoted the idea of the scooter as a saving grace in traffic. The production of the smallest displacement, the Vespa 50, followed a law that permitted it to be ridden without a licence plate or driving licence. It became the steed of the young. The earliest pollution warnings and ideological anti-pollution campaigns that followed led to the Vespa being seen as an antidote. And thus its history was made - "Vespa yourselves!", "With a Vespa you can", "Vespa riders eat the apple", "Unlike commuter sardines Vespa riders are young" and so on, in a succession of messages that, re-read today, do not seem banal advertising campaigns but almost forerunners of a common "political" sentiment, or at the very least examples of attention towards social issues that is unusual in the history of Italian industry. The Vespa lives on in the imagination of many generations of Italians (and Europeans and Americans and Africans and Asians), and not just because it is an iconic object. The Vespa is also one of the elements that forms a stable part of the landscape of our everyday lives. There aren't many of these - Coca Cola, Swatch, Polaroid, the Walkman, tennis shoes and maybe cars like the Dyane, the Beetle and the Cinquecento are a few of the names that leap to mind. Hence the Vespa became an involuntary character of (i.e. didn't bribe its way into) the arts and letters. We find it in the scenario of tens of films (the total number of Vespa-starrers is 83!), some of which are very well known, e.g. "Roman Holiday", "La dolce vita" and "Dear Diary", to name only the top three. It is a character in books by writers such as Folco Quilici, Gino and Michele or Vitaliano Brancati. It was snapped by Renato Guttuso and decorated by Salvador Dalì. It was photographed alongside the Pope, the Shah of Iran and the vice-presidents of India and Brazil. Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Ursula Andress and Audrey Hepburn rode it. Jacovitti made it the object of his comic strips. And even pop music, mainly outside Italy, used it. It even has a song all to itself - a tango, of course, titled La Vespa y la Guapa (the wasp and the beauty). Most importantly, however, the Vespas has been immortalised in millions of family photos, an object that accompanies personal memories and trips, as is witnessed by the thousands of Vespa Clubs created all over the world starting from the 1940s, with their rallies, periodicals and correspondence networks. They still exist, in a modern version - navigation on the Internet can reveal websites created by groups of Americans still in the thrall of the Italian scooter. The "aesthetic" aspect of the Vespa's presence in the Western world has always been reflected in the communication that accompanies its production. In various periods the Vespa campaigns have been able to anticipate mass trends. Longanesi's graphics, for instance, are linear, thin and witty in a time that didn't use poetic trends in advertising. Savignac's strong, scintillating designs preceded pop art. The legendary "Vespa riders eat the apple" campaign's graphics introduced mature pop art in Italy and pre-announced the mutation of pop art into the hippie and new dada styles. Dear old Vespa, always so modern. The Vespa is probably an immortal objet that unites generations and social classes, sexes, tastes and trends. A rapid overview of the themes that have featured in the communication of the Vespa shows us the overall evolution of Italian society (and perhaps all of Western society). First, the emancipation of the less fortunate classes during the reconstruction. Alongside this, the emergence of the young as individual entities with their own dignity, desires and destinies. Then women, transformed into independent individuals and no longer accompanying the rider. The environment is another topic that was emphasised in Vespa communication at a time in which it was not a real issue and had not yet been taken into consideration by politicians and progressive movements. But the Vespa could do all this because it is one of those objects capable of defining a country, Italy, that has few other "distinguishing marks" on its modern-day passport - pizza, pasta, coffee, O Sole mio, Venice, the Siena Palio, panettone (spiced brioche with sultanas eaten at Chrsitmas), fashion and Borsalino hats. But while all these give an idea of the tradition and culture of the past, the Vespa also offers invention and modernity, with the dash of sentiment, originality and moderated revolution that this rather progressive vehicle knows how to add. The Vespa's traits are lovely, but it is essentially made for those who aren't well off. It amuses without forgetting its primary utilitarian function. It is free and nonconformist, without letting itself go as far as the roars and violence of speed. The engineer Corradino D'Ascanio of the Marches, a democratic man who invented the Vespa by borrowing bits and pieces of motorcycles and aeroplanes, would be glad that its 50-plus years of life haven't taken away any of the lightness and depth of his little big "scooter". |
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