JOURNEYS

Inside me I feel that the first real solo trip was the one made a hot summer night, I think July 1969, when I was shooting with my mighty Vespa 160 GS (I had to finish there). I was in my country house, in Pegui, I had a strong toothache and the Vespa with the broken clutch cable. In the evening, after going to bed and turning around repeatedly without falling asleep, I thought I could use the night to solve the problem of the tooth and the cable. To get to La Spezia (16/17 km) the road was fairly flat, apart from the climb of Buonviaggio, I thought that calmly I could make it, taking advantage of the descents and pushing in the climbs, in the morning I would have been in front of the mechanic to replace the cable. At about 2:00 am I informed my parents and I started to push the Vespa up the dirt road uphill, until I got on the saddle and I let myself go with the engine off along the descent towards the Torretta. The silence and the coolness of the night enveloped me, only the noise of the wheels on the asphalt and that of the wind that moved the leaves accompanied my journey. Arrived at the Torretta with a slight descent continued for a few miles, then I began to push, calmly, a little pushed the Vespa and then I stopped, I put on the stand and stayed to hear the silence of the night, I felt myself master of myself, there was nobody, absolute desert, a marvel. Arrived in Bottagna began the most tiring part, but the spirit was high and the calm inside of me with the knowledge that I was succeeding in the enterprise helped me to push the scooter up the ascent of Buonviaggio, arrived on the hill at the moment when dawn dawned, I rested and admired the city in the distance, then went up the Vespa and let myself go to the pleasure of the descent; with the push of speed I arrived a few hundred meters from the mechanic: Attilio, under the church of Migliarina where my father went for all the repairs since I was a child. I parked in front of the workshop and went to look for an open baker to eat some focaccia, when Attilio arrived, he changed the cable and went to the dentist to have the damn tooth cured!

I made the second solo trip in 1971 with my beautiful yellow Ducati 450 Scrambler. The project was to go in Rome with a friend, guests of his aunt, then to reach Vallelunga to see a car race, but as often happens, at the last moment the friend could not come, so I found myself alone in center of the capital in his aunt’s house. It is a fact that the illness of traveling was very welcome and in the first months of 1972 I decided to widen the scope of action: in the end of March I left for Paris

MY WIKILOC TRIPS