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UMBERTO ECO:
“THE FORBIDDEN VESPA-FRUIT”

“A FORBIDDEN FRUIT, AN OBJECT OF DESIRE, A MAGICAL INSTRUMENT”: THE ICONIC SCOOTER IN THE RECOLLECTIONS OF THE GREAT ITALIAN SCHOLAR AND INTELLECTUAL AS A YOUNG MAN, FROM THE FAIR-HAIRED VESPA RIDER WHO WON THE HEART OF HIS CLASSMATE TO THE AIRY ELEGANCE OF A GIRL IN A LONG SKIRT CLINGING TO HER DRIVER ON THE BACK SEAT…

Audrey Hepburn embraced Gregory Peck on a Vespa in the film "Roman Holiday" (1953)

Twenty years ago, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Vespa, Piaggio published “The cult of Vespa”: a collection of writings by distinguished names in the arts. One of the authors was Umberto Eco (Alessandria 1932 – Milan 2016), semiologist, philosopher, university professor and writer, who achieved worldwide fame with his best-selling novel “The Name of the Rose”, translated into 47 languages and the inspiration for the film of the same name with Sean Connery. In memory of Umberto Eco, who died on 19 February at the age of 84, we present an abridged version of the article he wrote twenty years ago, where he talks about his schoolboy memories of the Vespa, which for him was a symbol of a sublime, incorruptible desire. A desire that remained unfulfilled, as the title of his article, “The forbidden Vespa-fruit”, reveals.

The actress Lucia Bosè with her husband: the Spanish bullfighter Miguel Dominguín

A POSTWAR PHENOMENON THAT HAS CONTINUED. “As I take up my pen to respond to the invitation to write something about what undoubtedly was, and has continued to be, a social phenomenon of postwar Italy, I hesitate, because I realise that this is a phenomenon which passed me by at a certain distance. I went zig-zagging through the joyful parade of Vespas on my antique bike like an outsider, albeit not wholly indifferent. Now that I am called to bear witness to this phenomenon, I realise that the truth is not so much that the Vespa didn’t concern me, but that I removed its presence from my mind because, for me, it was like a forbidden fruit. To put it in what is by now a dated terminology, it was a question of both economic structure and ideology. I belonged to a family which was undoubtedly not rich, but not poor, either. An office-worker’s family, whose pride lay in the fact that the children had everything they needed, in the way of food, clothes, education, and a month’s holiday in the countryside every year, renting a couple of rooms from distant relations who were farmers. This comfortable situation was only possible thanks to thrifty administration, a horror for waste, and a calm indifference to the superfluous. Perhaps I should remind my readers of the economic conditions of Italian families immediately before and after the war, when every middle-class family dreamt, as a famous Italian song says, of having “one thousand liras a month”… The thought would never have crossed my mind that I could ask my father for a scooter, as I continued to pedal around on my pre-war bike, with its tyres all patched up as a result of dozens of tiring repair jobs. My request would have aroused such amazement that it never occurred to me that I could make it. Consequently, I didn’t even feel the need for this unthinkable possession…”

Vespa Primavera advertising, 70’s

THOSE CLASSMATES ON THE VESPA. “And yet the Vespas were there, racing past me, all around me, ridden by boys of my age, or a little older… And every day, at a certain time, the others (who included many boys I went to school with, and even some close friends of mine) entered into another world. In that other world, they had their Vespas. For me, the Vespa went together with the boogie-woogie and the snow-capped Alpine peaks. They would jump on it at the gates of the school, where we had been united by the same fears and the same schoolboy tricks up to a few minutes before. In the evening, they would arrive on their Vespas in the square where we whiled away hours chattering on the benches …”

Vespa Primavera advertising, 70’s

THE BELOVED CONQUERED BY THE FAIR-HAIRED VESPA RIDER. “…I fell in love, as sometimes happens at that age. I used to write poems about my languidly Platonic love stories in secret, because it seemed impossible to declare my passion openly to the unattainable She, the lovely flower beside which I felt like an importunate worm … I would meet the group of girls, and look at my Beloved, and my day was made; I was in seventh heaven! But sometimes the girl was not together with the group, and as I hurried on, fearing that some jealous divinity had stolen her from me, something terrible happened… She was still there, in front of the school steps, as if waiting for someone. And up drove (on a Vespa) a boy that I couldn’t compete with, because he was already an undergraduate, tall, fair-haired, disdainful… He helped her on to the Vespa, and each time, the perverse pillion-rider – so much the more desirable – escaped from my clutches forever.” Addressing the new generations (in jeans, miniskirts and hot pants), Eco noted “what perverse grace, what airy elegance a long skirt gave to a girl, as she clung to her driver on the back seat of a Vespa that swept away, and then disappeared…”
“This is what the Vespa was for me,” wrote Umberto Eco at the end of his article. “A magical instrument, which I never really desired, because it was beyond every possible desire, and at the same time, it frustrated my desire – or rather, it made it sublime, allowing it to live in an uncorruptible world…”