Why a Guzzi? Why the Stone?
Welcome to Stone The Road, a two-wheel travel blog named for the bike in question, Moto Guzzi’s V7 II, a model known even in Italy as the “Stone.”
Hit the road, stone the road: the difference is a matter of style. The 2016 V7 II updates a classic beauty, a motorcycle essentially unchanged in its lines since 1977. Like a Shaker chair, a Mies van der Rohe house or an Olivetti manual typewriter, the V7 II looks the way design looks when form marries function and lives happily ever after.
And Stone style isn’t just a pretty thing. Back in the Wild Ones day, big, bad bikers crossed the continent on machines tiny by today’s touring standards: 350s, 400s, the rare 700. In an era of 1800 cc, 900-pound touring machines, the 750 cc, 417-lb V7 speaks for essence over excess.
I’ve sold my ’96 BMW R1100RT and my 2012 Suzuki V-Strom 1000, both great bikes, both big plastic-shrouded land jets, both so overweight I couldn’t pick them up out of a roadside ditch without a crane. And, thanks to Moto International’s Fly and Ride program, I’m flying from my home in New England to Seattle to buy a new, 2016 Stone and ride it home.
