The Vespa: social history of an industrial innovation

This article traces the genesis of an idea: that of the Vespa scooter, officially introduced on the Italian market in 1946 by the Piaggio corporation. The first section follows the process of autonornization of an international field of the scooter between Europe and the United States during the first half of the 20th century. The second part points at the existence of Italian scooters before the introduction of the Vespa and sheds some light on a public and polyphonic discourse advocating the production of a "people's motorbike" at the end of the 1930s. One of the most assertive and influential voices defending the importance of a utility motorbike is that of Renato Tassinari, the director of the Fascist daily 11 Littoriale, national deputy of the Corporation of Newspapers and Print Media at the Camera dei Fasci, and an admirer of Nazi Germany. Tassinari, who will be hired by Piaggio at the end of the war as head of its corporate newsletter, can be considered as the missing link between the Vespa and the pre-1946 scooters. The last section of the article focuses on the entrepreneurial properties of the sub-field constituted by the Piaggio corporation as early as the 1930s: the good technological level of its production plants, its international market, and its long-standing commitment to diversification in the transportation sector. These properties eased the shift from aeronautics to motor-scooters after 1945. However, a last building block in the genesis of the Vespa is the social trajectory of engineer Corradino D'Ascanio, who invented the Vespa. In conclusion, the article sums up the internal and external conditions that led to the birth of the most famous scooter in the world.