Mith his full belly and fluffy beard, Vespa-Giorgio, as he likes to be called, doesn’t exactly fit the cliché of a heartthrob. In addition, the 65-year-old, who came from a village near Belgrade, seems rather shy. “So how do you get in touch with girls?” Vespa-Giorgio asked himself as a teenager – although he had neither a belly nor a beard at the time. At the age of fourteen he finally had an idea: a Vespa was needed. He bought it with the first money he earned himself. “As a result, all the village beauties wanted to drive around with me,” he says. Vespa-Giorgio invested every dinar in gas and beautification work on his scooter. What Vespa-Giorgio loved most was a route that first went steeply uphill, then steeply downhill: “The girl on the pillion had to hold on to me so as not to fall off.”
In Italy, the country of origin of the scooter, there are 450 Vespa clubs. Meetings of the “Vespisti” take place at different locations every year. The highlight is always a joint trip into the countryside, as was the case this weekend in Pontedera, the place of origin of the Vespa. The small Tuscan town lies at the mouth of the Era River in the Arno, halfway between Pisa and Empoli.