A 125cc Primavera Vespa scooter takes pride of place at the basement of the National Museum, which is presenting a 'retro'-spective gallery called "Weapons of Mass Desire: Design and Consumption in the Aftermath of World War II". From kitchenware to street fashion, the exhibition attempts to trace the insidious path of technologies that moved from maiming people to killing time.
The scooter, a treasured artefact in the museum's collection, dates back to the 1960s, but these rides (which I like to see as two-wheeled equivalents to VW Beetles) hail all the way to 1946, when Piaggio's plant in Pontedera converted its production lines from making aircraft engines to automobiles. In build, the scooter borrows from aeronautic design with features such as a forward single tube fork and wheel suspension that recalls the carriage of long range bombers. So popular were the bikes that factories opened all over the world, including one in Singapore in 1965.
Growing up in the relative deprivation of a small town, my duck never had the pleasure of associating this vehicle with romantic holidays in Rome. But it's oddly appropriate that the scooter is named after a buzzing insect (the prototype was dubbed "Donald Duck", if wikipedia is to be believed), which its original two-stroke cylinders mimicked. For instead of fair Audrey, visions of Vespas conjure thoughts of a cigar-chomping high school discipline master on a smoking green machine, who demanded a salute whenever he passed by and was never without his faithful rattan cane with tattered ends that had split from delivering one too many stings.
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