Livorno
Livorno is a port town surrounded by unlovely warehouses and chimney stacks. I decide it is my favourite place in Italy so far. Livorno is home to Filippo and Marco. Filippo is known on the internet as The Waspmaster. He was the one who pointed me towards Sophia's listing on eBay, when I emailed him for advice. His friend Marco restores Vespas and has the cleanest workshop on the planet. Filippo and Marco are showing me around Livorno. I have eaten squid-ink risotto. I have drunk ponce, a local drink made from rough rum, at Bar Civili. I have puttered around the ancient canals in a motorboat at midnight watching the tarponi, giant rats, swimming back to their sewers after feasting on the market litter. Did I tell you I have drunk ponce, a local drink made from rough rum, at Bar Civili? Maybe that's why I keep waking up on the sofa in Marco's workshop rather than the hotel room that I've paid for but never end up using.
Marina di Pisa
Tonight is the Sagra del Pinolo, the Feast of the Pine Nut. I am buzzing along the Art Deco boulevards of Terrenia with Marco, Filippo and a local artist called Francesco. We are all riding Vespas or Lambrettas. It feels like I am living in an episode of The Many Lives of Doby Gillis. We leave the coast and ride along a road lined by heavily scented pine trees until we reach San Piero a Grado, one of the oldest churches in Italy. The fields that surround it have been transformed into a crowded carnival celebrating everything pine nut. Over a meal of spaghetti al pinolo and steak barbequed over pine cones, I learn that people from Lucca call the shapely cowls of a Vespa polmoni (lungs). In Livorno, they call them puppe, slang for breasts. In Rome, they call them chiappe, buttocks. The term the Romans use makes most sense to me. I also discover that I have chosen the wrong saint to watch over Sophia. Before I left Sydney, I bought a Mary, mother of God, fridge magnet to do the job. 'Mary is too tired,' says Marco. 'She has been worn out by centuries of requests.' 'You need a new saint,' says Filippo. 'Someone fresh off the bench with energy to burn.' 'Like Padre Pio,' says Francesco. 'He was only just canonised. He still has much strength.' I buy a freshly minted Padre Pio fridge magnet from a stall at the carnival. I ride back to Livorno with the smell of the sea in my nostril and the undeniable feeling that Sophia is riding much, much more smoothly.
San Gimignano
I have decided that the patchworked hills in this part of Tuscany were created by God for the sole purpose of riding a Vespa through them. I can smell the freshly cut hay. I can feel the warm sun on my skin. The tiny 125cc engine sounds like a wasp floating on a summer breeze. On the road back to the medieval hilltop towers of San Gimignano I pass a group of redfaced English people on a cycle tour of Tuscany. They are slugging back water and summoning up the energy for one last hill. At the gates I spot a pair of Dutch bikers on Ducatis, peeling off gluggy sweat-soaked leathers. I understand why both have chosen to see Tuscany the way they have. Cycling offers intimacy with the landscape. Motorcycling the thrills of traversing winding and dipping roads. Sophia offers me the benefits of both.
Siena
The golden stone walls of Siena are surrounded by car parks. It is summer and they are packed with mobile homes and cars with English, Dutch and German number plates. The hotels are full too. I ride to a kiosk near the Stadio Comunale, just outside the walls, where the local tourist board offers a room finding service. I park Sophia next to a group of other Vespas and join the long queue. The young guy serving beckons me to the front. 'That is my Vespa there,' he says pointing to the PX parked next to Sophia. He asks me why I am riding an old Vespa and I tell him. 'You are the kind of tourist we want,' he says, quickly finding me a room. 'If I didn't have to serve these people we could ride together.' As the sun sets I ride Sophia into the heart of old Siena. Cars are banned from this part of the town but on Sophia I can go anywhere I please. I bounce along the cobbled streets, weaving through tourists and around baskets of pasta and bottles of olive oil. I park Sophia with a clump of other Vespas on Il Campo, the famous central square. I sit in front of the square's palazzi to soak up the atmosphere. The tour groups are gone and the day-trippers are returning to their vehicles before they are impounded. Soon it is only me, a band playing to a handful of restaurant patrons and some of feral travellers playing bongos and washing in the 19th-century replica of the medieval Gaia fountain. It strikes me that the ferals have the freedom to go wherever they want, too. It's just that my way doesn't involving getting chased out of town by angry shopkeepers and pissed-off carabinieri.
Massa Maritima
I discover early in my trip that the drop between the hook under Sophia's front seat and the running boards where I rest my feet is the exact same length as a plastic carrier bag. The discovery transforms my trip. I start every day buying provisions for a picnic somewhere suitably picturesque en route. This morning I am in Massa Marittima, an ancient mining town that sits high in the Colline Metallifere, looking out across the bleak plains of southern Tuscany. The metalbearing hills provided the town with much of its wealth during the 12th century, funding the building of the cathedral, Palazzo Comunale and other impressive buildings surrounding Piazza Garibaldi. I visit Casa della Frutta to buy fruit and salad. The woman who serves me gives me an impromptu Italian lesson, slowly pronouncing the name of each item as she puts it on the scale. At Panificio Romano the baker suggests the panine frustini Geovesi, a Genovese-style bread he sells at €3.62 a kilo. At Il Salumeria I dodge the different coloured and shaped pasta hanging in clear cellophane bags to pick up some bocconcini cheese, olives and local wildboar ham. I finish with a cappuccino and a bombolone (doughnut) overlooking the square. As I leave Massa Marrittima, cutting across the piazza with my provision dangling beneath the seat, a hearse pulls up in front of the cathedral. The church bells toll three sad notes – up, up, down – and two nuns scurry down the stone stairs to comfort the mourners as they emerge. I ride past, an Australian on a 40-year-old Vespa. A photographer, attending a conference in town that's sponsored by Kodak, takes a photo. I am just another element in his carefully constructed scene.
Sutri
It is only 50 kilometres until I reach Rome. I've just taken a stiff shot of espresso in a café with a marble bar and coffee machine with more chrome than a '57 Chevy. I return to Sophia and find an old lady standing beside her and weeping. Her daughter translates, 'She says it is the Vespa of her youth.' In Menaggio, Sophia reminded the local librarian of the time he courted his wife with hands covered in Vespa engine oil. In Castell'Arquato a barman reminisced about his childhood, when his whole family rode on a Vespa to the nearest village every Sunday. Upon reaching it had decide whether to buy pizza or petrol. If they chose pizza, his dad had to push the Vespa home. In Italy, everyone has a Vespa story. Sophia has her own tale too. Her first owner her first bought her especially to woo a girl. He had an extra saddle seat fitted so she would be comfortable throughout their long courtship. And he had fitted her with all the available accessories to prove to his prospective father-in-law that he was a man of means. When the couple finally wed, Sophia was draped in ribbons and used as the wedding vehicle. Back in Sutri the old lady brushes away her tears and waves as I ride off. And she smiles. For a moment she is young again, her lustrous hair under a headscarf as she rattles along on her Vespa, flirting with the boys and bursting with brio for what lay ahead.
Rome
I have a favourite 'circuit' in Rome. I sweep around the Vittorio Emmanuel monument
and buzz up Via dei Fori Imperiali like Charlton Heston on a chariot in Ben-Hur. Trajan's
Market is on my left, the Forum on my right; ahead, the Colosseum. I slingshot around it,
rattle back along the cobbled back streets and start all over again.
It is three months since I set out from Milan and I am finally in Rome. A plane would
have taken an hour to do the journey; a train, maybe eight; a car, a little longer. But it
wouldn't have been anywhere near as much fun.
My girlfriend Sally has joined me.We rattle around the city pretending we are in Roman
Holiday (she is the perfect Audrey Hepburn; I am a decidedly low-rent Gregory Peck). We
weave our way through the throngs to the Trevi Fountain. She tosses a coin in but refuses to
tell me what she wishes for.
Sally says I've changed in three months. Now I can see the intelligence in driving up a
one-way street to cut three minutes off a journey. I'll ride on the inside, outside and anywhere
between cars to get where I want to go. And I love jockeying at the lights with other scooter
riders and buzzing off just before the light turns green.
We spend Sally's last night in Rome's liveliest quarter, Trastevere. Its tightly knit lanes
overflow with pavement cafés and restaurants. It is the closest thing to the lively nightspots
featured in La Dolce Vita. I park Sophia with a flock of other Vespas beside the Santa Maria
church and we plunge in, holding hands, to be washed along by the quarter's crackling brio.
We return to our hotel along Via Nazionale. I buzz around the roundabout at Piazza della
Repubblica and into a restricted traffic zone. A policewoman standing on the corner spots me
and blows her whistle. I notice from her uniform that she works for the metropolitan police. It
is a branch of the police force that Gianni told me I could ignore. I wave and keep going. She
shrugs her shoulders and allows me to pass.
I can't help but grin. I'm not a Vespa virgin anymore .... Fin
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