Lambretta is a world known Italian scooter: driven by the English Mods in the Sixties and Seventies, and by the people of India in the Eighties. All around the world Lambretta has been a symbol of the Italian style. But its history is also the history of the “rise and fall” of a great industrial production. Synopsis Between 1946 and 1947 Italy begins to move. Its compact engine is roughly one hundred cubic centimetres, set up in the centre, or sideways, on a tubular frame, with a stamped body. Vespas and Lambrettas at once become the symbol of a newly found Italian vitality, following the trauma of civil war. Distances grow smaller, ideas circulate, people meet. Mass phenomena are the real news: going to the beach is no longer a luxury for the rich. Going places for an outing, going to work with a vehicle with an engine, all gradually become common practice. Mass speed, a new way of seeing the country and of speaking, a new class of people facing history. Italy acquires a new self-perspective; no longer a poor agricultural nation, dominated by the patriarchal, archaic rules of religious institutions. This is the iconography of the economic Boom, developing towards the end of the Fifties, the post-war era left behind and the Sixties approaching. Images of Hollywood film stars going round on Vespas, queues for picnics, a whole family on two wheels, the gatherings, the adventures of made in Italy scooters – all part and parcel of the national identity, already described at the time by artists and official cinema news broadcasts, alongside ministers cutting ribbons and the good customs of the people of the “Belpaese”.