K'S NEW VESPA!

That's right, it's the sweet new fuel-injected GTS300, the most powerful Vespa in the world, and it could blow clean past 70 mph or so even with me on back (and the front wheel skimming pavement MotoGP-style). Unfortunately it's also well over $8k. To tell you the truth, in all the excitement I forgot pretty much everything else about it. Except it's pretty dang photogenic, no?

Piaggio held a little open house at their Costa Mesa training center a couple weeks ago, well-attended by all the usual motojournalist suspects. Piaggio makes more scooters than any other manufacturer in the world, or sells more in the U.S. Or something like that. Anyway, Piaggio sales are said to be up in the U.S., a trend that can only continue if you ask me. While there's no denying SoCal is a spread-out place, I think many, many of us who live here have learned to not stray too far from home too much of the time. And as we catch up to the downward economic spiral of the rest of the third world, scooters will be huge.

Piaggio owns Vespa (the Rolls-Royce/Cadillac/Mercedes-Benz of scooters thanks to the all-steel chassis and historical cache), along with Aprilia and Moto-Guzzi. Let's be friends?

Not only did the Piaggio people serve some excellent meatballs, we made off with a nice bottle of extra virgin olive oil and a most excellent, 300-plus page book VESPA Italian Style for the World, from which I took the liberty of lifting the four photos below... prego!