From Scooter to Scooterist: A Cultural History of the Italian Motorscooter

A Senior Thesis Presented To Prof. Anne Cook Saunders on December 17th, 1998 By Mary Anne Long

Read this great history of the motorscooter.

Introduction
Flying through fields and forests, buzzing on the wind, speeding over the flowers, rushing under the trees; I clutch the harness of a giant wild Wasp. I feel the sun, the wind and the earth as the road and the scooter dance together. Twelve years ago I bought a 1964 Vespa scooter and now I am a dedicated scooterist. Follow me on a journey from scooter to scooterist, from manufactured product to individual expression, from surface to symbol, from pre-modern to post. In this paper, we will examine how the Italian motorscooter transcends beyond the object to become a cultural icon and a subcultural identity.

It is difficult to follow a linear path when illustrating the cultural significance of an object. The product, the media and the consumer do not exist as constants in an economist’s equation, but they all impact and respond to each other. Manufacturers and marketers respond to changes in the consumer, the consumer responds to the products and advertising.

Even though we can not dissect the scooter from the scooterist, we can follow the cultural significance from pre-modern to modern and into the post-modern. Examining these three phases, we will see the focus of the scooter, the media and the consumer shift from the function of the scooter, to its appearance, and finally to its meaning. In the pre-modern era, scooters provided inexpensive and discreet transportation for the Suffragettes. In the modern era, scooters were "dressed" to be more attractive and advertisements featured attractive young ladies.

Now the scooterist can only see the scooter through over fifty years of representation; the subject reflects back on the object via the symbol. Scooters have come to mean many different things to many people; it’s the golden post war era, it’s the summer vacation in Rome, it’s 50s.....

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