The scooter brings with it diverse identities. Mostly it's remembered as the scooter of 1964, Mods on board, travelling down the road, an icon of public disorder. It is a memory of threatening over- customization, a statement of challenging excess. The scooter of 1960s Britain was a simple form of transport that was forced to join the rebel motorcycle on the wrong side of the rails. But while the two-wheeled highway led right through the centre of the swinging sixties, the scooter was about to take a premature side-turning to obscurity. How different from the grand plan it all was!
The scooter did not always belong to the Mods, it first belonged to Italy, to be exact post-war Italy. From 1945 to 1960, the Italian scooter eclipsed the traditional motorcycle. In Britain, in 1959, over half the 330,000 new two-wheeler registrations of that year were scooters. While the Mods and Rockers clashes of 1963 and 1964 may have been over-hyped by the media, the scooter-mania of the 1950s was more than real. And this was no accidental phenomenon. Two large Italian industrial companies, Piaggio and Innocenti, orchestrated a manufacturing and marketing plan that literally shifted millions of their unique products, the Vespa. and the Lambretta.
