Sharp dressing, sharp talking, sharp design. They put us in a holiday frame of mind, transport us on overcast mornings, along with the smell of good, strong espresso, to Piazza Navona. Api are used as mobile coffee bars in London. Where the Vespa (wasp) is for play and display, the Ape (bee), its droning three-wheeled sibling, is for work and delay. How, like wasps, they evoke Italian holidays, all wind-in-the-hair switchbacks along the Amalfi coast in search of the perfect ice cream, coffee and beach. How they buzz like the wasps they are named after. I am spirited into any number of narrow streets where these characterful vespines create an urban soundtrack as Italian as any by Verdi. I think of Nanni Moretti's curiously touching film Dear Diary, in which the director stars, riding his scooter in search of the subtopian wasteland where Pier Paolo Pasolini, director of the provocative Pigsty (1969) and Decameron (1970), was murdered. When I hear the word Vespa, I think of raven-haired girls in fashionable sunglasses perched pouting on a vespiary of motor-scooters in the Piazza Navona.
