Ruins to Riches How Vespa Took Off from Post-WW2 Italy
Vespa: the stylish Italian scooter that can be found in any corner of the world. What might surprise you is that Vespa’s origin comes straight out of Italy’s destruction during the Second World War. In this post, we will see how Vesta was able to break through the economic turmoil if it’s time to achieve worldwide fame.
Italy in the post-WW II era
By the end of World War II, Italy had been left in ruins. It had surrendered to the Allies in 1943 and was almost immediately occupied by Germany. Thus, over the next two years, the peninsula became a fierce battlefield that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands. The country had its infrastructure bombed out and ended up in massive debt. Come 1964, and Italy’s government was too weak to restart its industry.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world was switching focus back to normal consumer production, with the gas-powered automobile being one of the most popular postwar goods.
During the war, automotive factories had been converted for wartime military production, and while the industrialized allied countries could afford the switchover back to civilian production, Italy’s government was in way too much debt to support such a transition. Without a repaired infrastructure or any government support, the industrialists of Italy had their hands tied. They had to make due with the very limited resources they had, and more importantly, they had to adapt.
In comes Enrico Piaggio, who ran the eponymous Piaggio Company. Prior to the war, the Piaggio family produced locomotives and train cars, but once war broke out, their factory had been converted for military production, like most others in Italy. Piaggio produced some of Italy’s best-performing aircraft during the Second World War, which of course made it a prime target for allied bombing.
Shifting gears
By 1945, their factory had been raised to the ground, and Enrico didn’t have the money to rebuild such an expensive production line. Suffice to say, he knew that it was time to shift gears.
Now with Italy’s roads demolished, Enrico knew that his fellow countrymen would struggle to find a usable mode of transportation. Italy’s infrastructure was in such a bad state of disrepair, that driving full-sized vehicles was practically out of the question.
Enrico had to figure out a new method of transport that was both sturdy and versatile enough to survive whatever was left of Italy’s roads. Luckily for him, he already had seen the early scooter during the war. Cushman Scooters from America had been used during the Second World War by soldiers to get around bases faster. They were also dropped in alongside paratroopers or were used to sneak in between enemy lines.
Of course, because of their military nature, comfort was not really considered in the design, nor was the driver protection, or any semblance of visual appeal. Thus, Enrico’s job extended beyond the technical specifications. The vehicle he wanted to build would have to be stylistically bold enough to push Italy forward.
“It looks like a wasp”
Luckily, there was plenty of engineering talent in Italy at the time. The country had been banned from developing any military technology for 10 years after the war, which of course left many engineers out of a job. Enrico hired one such man to build a prototype, one sturdy enough to withstand the bombed-out infrastructure, yet cheap enough for a country left in financial ruin.
Enrico’s new engineer had actually been one of the leading Italian helicopter designers, and thus he could apply principles from aircraft engineering to overcome the obstacles inherent to two-wheeled vehicles.
As a counterpart to the dirty effect of motorcycles, he designed a body that would protect the driver from any dirt or rocks. He concealed the engine to keep oil grease and dirt off of the driver. The ultimate focus, however, was on the scooter’s design. The prototype Enrico eventually saw evoked a rather interesting response from him. Enrico looked at the wide central piece and the steering rod resembling antennas and he remarked that it looked like a wasp, the word for which in Italian is Vespa.
Production was easy enough to finance, especially when compared to building aircraft, and so by the spring of 1946, the Vespa was already being sold to the public. In his first full year, Enrico sold two and a half thousand dealers, and he wisely invested the profits into expanding his factory. The next year, sales quadrupled to 10,000 Vespas, growing to 60,000 by the turn of the decade. Pretty soon, a new verb caught on in Italian parlance, vespare, which means to go somewhere in an investment.
The world goes crazy for Vespas
Before long, the whole of Italy had fallen in love with the fashionable scooter. It was clean, lightweight, and dependable, so it rapidly became an everyday mode of transportation.
Although its original purpose was to overcome Italy’s destroyed infrastructure at the time, Vespa’s unique aesthetic captured the attention of consumers abroad. Enrico began exporting vespers to India in 1948, becoming the country’s first scooter dealer, where it enjoyed a near-monopoly for decades.
The Vespa also became an American sensation with the release of the film Roman Holiday in 1953, in which Audrey Hepburn rides the iconic Italian scooter around Rome. It’s estimated that over 100,000 units were sold as a direct result of just that movie. Then you have something like the Mods, a subculture in London, which based itself around riding Vespas into the late hours of the night. As a cheap, dependable mode of transportation, the Vespa was perfect for a teenage Mods looking for freedom from the mundane.
Becoming a cultural icon was the Vespa’s road to global fame, which it still retains to this day. Enrico’s story is proof that you can make the best out of a bad situation, and the bombing of Vitale during World War II was pretty bad.
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