The Vespa communication exhibition: beyond the imaginary.Tommaso Fanfani
In a broadcast to the nation on Radio Milano on July 2 1945, Ferruccio Parri, Prime Minister of freed Italy, described the disastrous condition of a country afflicted by hunger, inflation and unemployment. The pitted roads, collapsed bridges and rubble-filled cities and countryside were signs of widespread destruction. Many other countries in Europe and elsewhere were in much the same state. In this context the intellect of those who bore the social responsibility of putting the country and the world back on their feet had to reckon with extraordinary situations and find the capability to innovate, rebuild and return to everyday life. This included the concept of mobility as a way for people to re-establish the daily pattern of exchange, work and social life. In a small Tuscan town called Pontedera an entrepreneur who had until then produced aeroplanes and trains intuited that normalcy need not necessarily mean restarting the construction of radial aircraft engines or railway wagons, but that it could very well mean building less complex means of transport for mass distribution. In fact his aircraft and train wagon production required raw materials that were impossible to find and equally unavailable incoming capital, while such material and capital as he had would be sufficient to build a small vehicle. Enrico Piaggio, the Ligurian businessman in charge of the family's plants in Pisa and Pontedera, was surrounded by engineers and technicians of high calibre and creativity as well as workers he could employ. These men and women, technicians and workers, could do anything an entrepreneur required as long as he could guarantee employment and future prospects. The problem and the solution to a decidedly complex situation came from Piaggio's own engineers and technicians. During the long periods of inactivity they had been forced into in the last few months of the war, when orders had stopped coming in and the factory (transferred in the interim to Biella) had closed down, they had kept themselves busy designing a variety of objects, from saucepans to metallic traves, as well as recovering raw or partially worked material to hoard against better times. One of these varied objects was a small vehicle put together with material they had salvaged, their idea being to create something that could be used to get easily about on. From their drawings and experimentation emerged a little faired motorcycle, similar to the vehicle made by the engineer Belmondo from Turin. Presented somewhat hesitatingly to Enrico Piaggio, it would become the main idea to work on from autumn 1945 to April 1946. Those were feverishly busy months. Corradino D'Ascanio demanded unceasing commitment of his technical designers, who worked in rough conditions without the appropriate tools or material. The result was a small scooter (MP6), shown to Enrico Piaggio in his Pontedera workshops. The shape of the vehicle and the noise of its engine led Enrico to exclaim that it resembled a wasp ("vespa" in Italian), and the scooter received its definitive baptism. The extraordinariness of the Vespa's origins lay partly in Enrico's intuition of it being the right moment to produce a small, easy to ride vehicle that would consume little and put people back on wheels, and partly in the vehicle's own creativity, i.e. the concentrate of genius that D'Ascanio and his collaborators applied to it. The aeronautical engineer used some aircraft-building principles such as the sidearm on the front wheel instead of a fork, or the load-bearing body, and the use of lightweight materials for the body, but mainly worked on extremely simple concepts that were subsequently revealed to be elements of genius. When D'Ascanio designed the Vespa he started by tracing the outline of a person sitting comfortably as in his own drawing room, then drew the vehicle under him. This apparently simple idea revolutionised motorcycle design logic. D'Ascanio's front shield was intended to protect the rider from splashes when travelling the pothole-filled post-war roads. He avoided using a transmission chain, placed a small spare wheel on the vehicle so that a punctured tyre would be nothing more than a minor inconvenience, and placed all the controls on the handlebar, making riding easier not only for men but, as he himself remarked, "for women and priests" as well. The Vespa philosophy was hence a mix of common sense, practicality and cost-effectiveness, with a series of intelligent features that together represented extraordinary productive creativity. The chief designer's happy intuition was backed by the entrepreneurial vision of Enrico Piaggio, who courageously placed the vehicle on the market notwithstanding the difficulty of selling the first few vehicles produced in April 1946. He gave orders to produce another 2,500 Vespas although he had had an extremely hard time selling 50! He set up a sales company and a Piaggio dealer and service network in increasingly extended parts of Italy and overseas, introduced a concept of purchase in instalments that had until then been unknown in Europe and looked for and found partners in England, Germany, France and Spain. All in all, he created the conditions to suit the production of a vehicle that would conquer the world. And so it was. The secret was neither the Vespa's appealing design nor its ease of use or cost-effectiveness, but a combination of these factors and others that were not immediately perceived by the people who had thought up, produced and sold it. Parri had spoken of the Italian crisis and the difficulty of transport. Enrico Piaggio faced that problem and contributed to solving it, as did other manufacturers in different segments with varying degrees of success, such as Innocenti with the Lambretta, Guzzi with the Galletto, Fiat with its Topolino and so on. The transport problem was hence overcome and in the years to come the Vespa would become a symbol of economic, social and civil recovery of the whole country. The Vespa immediately became an object sought out by those of all ages and financial situations. The lucky owners of a Vespa often met in large rallies, sharing a pure passion that led to extraordinary events, races and shows such as sea-crossing, obstacle races and extreme exploits such as crossing the Andes, or travelling the English Channel between Dover and Calais, or seemingly impossible trips such as to the North Pole on a Vespa. Not only did the transport boom accompany Italy's economic miracle and the stability of a country that caught up in a few decades with an economic delay of centuries vis-à-vis more advanced nations, but the Vespa became a key element in influencing the habits, mentality and lifestyle of generations of young and older people. The scooter that fed people's dreams played a starring role in some of the best-known films, and its ability to portray social issues kept it astonishingly modern from "Roman Holiday" through to Italian director Nanni Moretti's "Dear Diary". The actors'fa-ces changed, as did the image of actresses dressed in the fashion of passing decades. Youngsters gambolled in cities and villages, men and women went to work and creative enthusiasts transformed their Vespas out of all imagination, demanding of the little scooter performances that constantly challenged mechanics and technology. Through all this the scooter made in Pontedera remained a lead player. Design changed and so did technology; electronics made their appearance, but Vespa time seemed to have stopped. The values the Vespa inspires include an infinite gradation along which the creative capability of communicators and the genius and intelligence of creative minds develop and strengthen. The Vespa can describe the world of transport as efficiently as those of nature, colour and fantasy. In creative hands the Vespa can recount all of society's emergencies and be the joint that fixes the complex dynamism of youth with the degrees of its adaptation to the problems of adolescence, its exceptional flexibility to meet the diverse demands of work and free time for men and women of every generation and every part of the world. Nature, colours, women, work, traffic, parking - these are just some key elements in deciphering the extraordinary wealth of images and communication that the Vespa has inspired and that can only be used by diligent readers of the ideas expressed by the texts. These contents surpass the technological innovation of the mechanical means of transport created in 1946 and transformed by successive generations of engineers and technicians. A look back over Vespa's sixty years through most significant advertising campaigns therefore becomes a series of pages not only entrusted to history but also capable of recounting change in a succession that goes beyond the imaginary world of a scooter destined to write the future. |
|
|