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Part 1
INTRODUCTION
The centre of Bristol was for many years given over to Italian cars and motorcycles. In the foreground is an early Laverda 750 twin with drum brakes. Behind it is a 900cc (actually 864cc) GTS Ducati, probably the most reliable of the bevel twins.
Italian motorcycles are revered out of all proportion to the numbers actually built. If you exclude sub-125cc machines and post-Cagiva-era Ducatis, only a few thousand of even the most successful models were built, compared to the tens of thousands that British manufacturers produced. Even today, the big four – Aprilia, Ducati, Moto Guzzi and MV Agusta – produce tiny numbers of motorcycles compared to the Japanese. Yet I would wager that as many people would recognize those Italian brands as would know the Japanese big four. That Ducati, in particular, are able to compete with the Japanese across the board is incredible given their size. Yet on racetracks and in road tests across the world, the Italians are rarely ‘also rans’. A Honda executive told me a few years ago that Honda is in MotoGP to sell millions of mopeds and scooters in the Far East. Ducati do not sell any small motorcycles, let alone mopeds, and consider building over 50,000 units a year, cause for celebration. As someone at the factory said: ‘When we win at racing, it is like everybody who works here is being given a big red parcel as a present’. The Italians can be absolutely ruthless business people, but with motorcycle manufacturing it is always more than that.
Part of this must be that overused word – passion. While top management is often dispassionate and focused on the bottom line, the same is rarely true of the people on the production line. I have been fortunate enough to visit the Moto Guzzi, MV Agusta and Ducati factories, and the enthusiasm on the factory floor is astounding. Italian motorcycles are usually built by people who believe they have one of the best jobs in the world, even if at times – especially during the 1970s and 1980s – there has been friction. But then, that was also true in England.
Moto Guzzi was one of the first manufacturers to offer rear suspension, operated via springs below the engine. Behind is a Morini, Aermacchi and (behind that) a rare Morini 350cc with 1980s’ rather slab-sided styling.
The Aguzzi referred to in the main text. Ridden from Italy, which sounds an achievement until you discover that hub-centre steering legend John Difazio walked.
The other thing about Italian motorcycles is the number of people who have wanted to build them. Initially, I expected to list well under a hundred marques, but quickly discovered there are mentions of almost 600 in Italy. And those were just the people who made formal and recorded plans: many others with a workshop must have looked at one of the many engines on sale as a standalone unit and thought about building a motorcycle. After all, the first TT-winning Norton had a Peugeot motor. Add to that the fact that, historically, Italy has always made fantastic motorcycle components – think Borrani wheels and Brembo brakes, for example, the latter often fitted to the best Japanese motorcycles. Indeed, when Gerald Davison, the first non-Japanese director at Honda, was running the NR500 ‘oval’ piston grand prix project, he was frequently frustrated that Honda Racing Corporation could not build small components as good as those he could buy off the shelf in Italy. So, new manufacturers found it easy to set up shop, if not stay the course. Many of the manufacturers survived only a year or so, leaving no record of the motorcycles they built. These are listed in the Appendix; but when the years a manufacturer survived, the region they were based in and some details of the motorcycles they built could be established, then they are listed in the main text.
Other manufacturers turned to motorcycle production out of the simple need to protect jobs and wealth creation when the allies forbade them to continue building military equipment after the Second World War. Chief among these are Aermacchi and (MV) Agusta, who have since returned to aircraft production. Even the Vespa scooter was created for the same reason.
Readers may notice that many companies failed in the run up to the Second World War, and that there are an awful lot of 175s. Both are related to the rise of Mussolini’s Government: manufacturers that fell from favour found themselves put out of business, and 175s were given huge tax breaks to ensure affordable transport was provided alongside larger motorcycles, which were still largely a hobby for the wealthy. 175s could also be ridden without a licence or insurance. Ironically, it was the post-war swing from fascism to communism that would push Ducati into motorcycle production. It is important to realize how quickly attitudes in Italy changed, swinging after many years of Fascist and Nazi rule to communism almost overnight. When finally liberated in April 1945, the people of Bologna initially took the Ducati brothers off to face a firing squad, proof of how divided the country had become. Bologna city council actually sent a Ducati 900SS to Fidel Castro as a gift, and it now sits in a museum in Havana having clearly been ridden.
Tax and licencing breaks made 175cc motorcycles incredibly popular in Italy, including for racing. This is a MDDS (macchine derivate di serie), which was a sportier but still production machine eligible to compete in Formula 3 racing and production classes in events like the Motogiro.
Italy has very few natural resources, although it does have healthy deposits of bauxite, from which aluminium can be extracted. Post-war especially, the poverty of subsistence farming quickly gave way to commuting to factories that sprung up to make anything that might create work and exports. A nation used to a short walk into the fields suddenly needed a means of reaching towns and cities, where they might find work, leading to a boom for anybody who could sell them cheap transport. Again, the rules on who could ride anything below 175cc were almost non-existent, meaning this as the capacity many manufacturers focused on. It was also the reason that the famous Motogiro races, touring the public roads of Italy, limited riders to motorcycles of no more that 175cc.
And this is very much the A–Z of Italian motorcycles. There are no scooter manufacturers listed, unless they also produced motorcycles. And those manufacturers who only made sub-50cc mopeds are also absent. The vast majority used the same Franco Morini or Minarelli two-strokes, and were almost indistinguishable from one another. Given that there were perhaps 200 of them, they too have been omitted, unless they were especially important to the UK market or part of the range of a motorcycle manufacturer.
The year that manufacturers were established is also difficult to address with certainty. Whilst Moto Guzzi started as a motorcycle manufacturer, many did not. Early pioneers might have started out as bicycle manufacturers, as did Bianchi, taking the obvious step into building motorcycles when the internal combustion engine came along. Ducati had nothing to do with complete motorcycles until the communists had ejected everybody with the Ducati name from the business. Despite Ducati celebrating ‘90 years of excellence’ in 2017, it was actually 1948 before a complete motorcycle bearing the Ducati name was sold. I have tried to make it clear in the text when a firm built its first motorcycle, while putting the year the business was established – regardless of what that business was – in the heading. So the founding date I have given for Ducati is 1927, and I have tried to apply this policy throughout.
And, finally, a caveat on completeness. The occasional periodical I publish, Benzina, had a reader send a photograph of an Aguzzi that is reproduced here. During a lunch break amble he had stumbled across the bike in 1985, chained to railings in London’s Little Venice. A connoisseur of Italian lightweights, he persevered with notes through letterboxes until he found the owner, an Italian waiter. Despite the little fifty being unregistered, he’d apparently ridden it over from Italy about eighteen months previously. Filled with good intentions, my reader paid £25 for the Aguzzi and stuck it at the back of his garage.
With little to go on, apart from ‘Ducati’ stamped on various components, and the Franco Morini engine labelled ‘no3’ presumably reflecting the three-speed hand-change gearbox, I approached dating specialist Stuart Mayhew. He has a treasured old book that includes a census of all motorcycle registrations by region in Italy but it had no mention of Aguzzi. Yet he had come across others in Italy as proprietor of Morini specialist North Leicester Motorcycles, so it is not a one-off.
The engine is by the nephew of Moto Morini founder Alfonso, Franco Morini. He started building engines in 1954, and the business grew quickly to make him the market leader in the production of small but powerful two-stroke engines. But all that really tells us is that the Aguzzi is 1954 or later.
The Ducati name is a red herring: Ducati is a common enough family name and appears on plenty of manufactured goods in Italy, and by 1955 Ducati had barely started building complete motorcycles.
So, Aguzzi was probably a dealer, engineer or even a blacksmith hoping to join the big time: unlike the British bike industry, where everything was made in-house, the Italians bought-in pretty much everything, so setting up as a motorcycle manufacturer was comparatively straightforward. The headlight fittings have shades of Meccanica Verghera (MV) lightweights, and the frame design definitely nods towards Ducati’s 98; beyond that nothing is known, so it cannot get an entry in the main text of this book. But it is an admission that while this should be the most complete A–Z of Italian motorcycles in print, there will be marques omitted that never got beyond building a handful of motorcycles before disappearing without trace. Aguzzi was one of them, but at least gets listed in the Appendix at th...
