In the spring of 1946, in a factory near Pisa that Allied bombers had flattened only months before, an engineer wheeled out a strange little machine — a step-through scooter with a rounded steel body and a small engine tucked by the rear wheel. Enrico Piaggio walked slowly around it. And then, the story goes, he said just four words: “Sembra una vespa.” It looks like a wasp.

The name stuck, and the world got the Vespa. What almost nobody remembers is that the company which built that scooter had, only a few years earlier, been building four-engine bombers.

This is the story of Piaggio — a company that has been, in turn, a railway works, one of Italy’s great aircraft makers, the creator of the most famous scooter on earth, and, as of last year, the property of a Turkish drone empire. Few names in aviation have lived so many lives.

It began with locomotives

Piaggio was not born to fly. In 1884, a 20-year-old named Rinaldo Piaggio founded Piaggio & C. near Genoa to build locomotives and railway carriages. It was the First World War that pulled the company into the sky: from 1917 Piaggio began turning out motor torpedo boats, seaplanes and aircraft, at first under licence and then to its own designs. By the 1930s it had become a genuine aviation power, setting 21 world records for speed and altitude between 1937 and 1939 from a gleaming new factory at Pontedera.

The four-engine bomber

Piaggio’s wartime masterpiece was the P.108, which first flew in 1939 — the only four-engine heavy bomber Italy operated during the Second World War, a machine in the same broad class as Britain’s Lancaster or America’s B-17. It carries a dark footnote: in August 1941, Bruno Mussolini, the dictator’s 23-year-old son, was killed while flying a P.108 prototype near Pisa when two engines failed on approach and the bomber stalled into a house short of the runway.

The war did not spare the company that built it. The Pontedera plant was pounded flat by Allied bombing, and by 1945 Piaggio’s proud aviation business was a field of rubble.

“It looks like a wasp”

Out of that rubble came the pivot that made Piaggio a household name. Enrico Piaggio, Rinaldo’s son, looked at a broke, broken Italy and saw not a market for bombers but a desperate need for cheap, simple personal transport. An early attempt he disliked, so he handed the problem to Corradino D’Ascanio — and this is the delicious twist. D’Ascanio was not a motorcycle man at all. He was a distinguished aeronautical engineer and a pioneer of the helicopter, and he actively disliked motorbikes: too dirty, too bulky, impossible to fix at the roadside.

So he designed the Vespa the way an aircraft engineer would. He gave it a stressed-steel monocoque body instead of a tubular frame, put the engine beside the rear wheel so a punctured tyre could be changed as easily as an aeroplane’s, shielded the rider’s legs so their clothes stayed clean, and made it light enough for anyone to ride. The result rolled out of the rebuilt Pontedera works in April 1946.

Within ten years, a million had been built. The Italian language gained a verb — vespare, to go somewhere by Vespa — and to this day more than 18 million have been produced. A helicopter engineer who hated motorcycles had built the most famous scooter in history.

Two companies, two destinies

Success on two wheels eventually pulled the company apart. In 1964 Piaggio’s aeronautical and scooter divisions were split into separate firms. The scooter side — today’s Piaggio Group, still headquartered at Pontedera and owner of Vespa, Aprilia, Moto Guzzi and Gilera — became one of the great names of European motoring.

The aviation side kept flying, and in 1986 it produced its own quiet masterpiece: the P.180 Avanti. With its engines mounted as pushers behind the wing, a small foreplane up front and a shape unlike anything else in the sky, the Avanti became one of the most distinctive — and fastest — turboprops ever built. If you have ever heard an unmistakable, high, buzzing note overhead and looked up to see an aircraft that seemed to be flying backwards, that was an Avanti.

From Pontedera to Ankara

The aviation arm’s luck ran out. Piaggio Aerospace slid into receivership in 2018 and spent six years under Italian state administration, its future uncertain. Then, at the end of 2024, it found an unexpected saviour: Baykar — the Turkish company behind the Bayraktar TB2, the combat drone that has reshaped modern warfare from Ukraine to the Caucasus. The deal was finalised in 2025.

So the 141-year-old Italian house that built railway carriages, seaplanes, a wartime bomber, the Vespa and the beautiful Avanti now belongs to a drone maker in Ankara.

A company of many lives

From a locomotive works near Genoa to bombers, from bombers to a scooter that looked like a wasp, from the Vespa to the elegant Avanti, and from Italian bankruptcy to a Turkish drone empire — Piaggio has reinvented itself again and again. It all traces back to a bombed-out factory, a helicopter engineer who couldn’t stand motorcycles, and four words from a man watching a wasp take shape in front of him.

Sources: Piaggio Group historical archive; Piaggio Aerospace; Breaking Defense; Defense News; Wikipedia.