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.

Le nom est resté, et le monde a adopté la Vespa. Ce que presque personne ne se souvient, c'est que l'entreprise qui fabriquait ce scooter construisait, quelques années auparavant seulement, des bombardiers à quatre moteurs.

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.

Tout a commencé avec les locomotives.

Piaggio n'était pas destiné à voler à l'origine. En 1884, Rinaldo Piaggio, alors âgé de 20 ans, fonde Piaggio & C. près de Gênes pour construire des locomotives et des wagons de chemin de fer. C'est la Première Guerre mondiale qui propulse l'entreprise dans les airs : dès 1917, Piaggio se lance dans la production de vedettes lance-torpilles, d'hydravions et d'avions, d'abord sous licence, puis selon ses propres plans. Dans les années 1930, l'entreprise devient une véritable puissance aéronautique, établissant 21 records du monde de vitesse et d'altitude entre 1937 et 1939 depuis sa toute nouvelle usine de Pontedera.

Le bombardier à quatre moteurs

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 détesté Les motos : trop sales, trop encombrantes, impossibles à réparer en bord de route.

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.

Deux entreprises, deux destins

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.

Le secteur aéronautique a continué de prospérer et, en 1986, il a produit son propre chef-d'œuvre discret : le P.180 Avanti. Avec ses moteurs montés comme les dealers 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.

De Pontedera à 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.

Ainsi, la maison italienne de 141 ans qui a construit des wagons de chemin de fer, des hydravions, un bombardier de guerre, la Vespa et la magnifique Avanti appartient désormais à un fabricant de drones basé à Ankara.

Une compagnie de nombreuses vies

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 : Archives historiques du groupe Piaggio ; Piaggio Aerospace ; Breaking Defense ; Defense News ; Wikipédia.