ITALY
COUNTRY ON WHEELS
6/16/52

Not since the Roman chariot have the Italians made a vehicle so peculiarly and proudly their own. Throughout the country, Italians ride to work and play on little scooters that do more than 100 miles on a gallon of gas. Whole families ride a scooter. While the father drives and one or two children stand between his seat and the handlebars, the mother sits behind, often with a baby in her lap. "The best way to fight communism in this country," says Enrico Piaggio, head of a business that makes the Vespa, "is to give each worker a scooter, so he will have a stake in the principle of private property." In Piaggio's plant, 60% of the 3,500 workers who once depended on bicycles or their feet for their transportation now own scooters.