There’s a new way to travel across Tuscany. No clutch to pull, no fuel mix to prepare, no cloud of smoke behind you. Just the hum of tires on the asphalt, the wind through the cypress trees and a vintage Vespa 50 gliding through the hills as if it were born to do it.
This is the experience offered by Vintaggio, founded by Maximilian Sterneder, who runs tours through the heart of Tuscany. And the Vespas you see in their photos, red, green, white, with the unmistakable lines of the 60s and 70s, are electrified with Retrokit.
Why the Vespa 50
Max chose the Vespa 50 Smallframe for a precise reason: it’s the icon of 1960s Italian design, and it’s perfect for Tuscan country roads, where 50 km/h speed limits turn slowness into a privilege.
There was one problem though. Putting a foreign tourist, perhaps on their first two-wheel experience, on a vintage Vespa with handlebar gear shift and clutch means spending the first day of the tour running a riding school. And the fuel mix, the spark plugs, the constant tuning don’t help when you manage a fleet that covers serious mileage every single day.
The electric conversion solved everything at once: no clutch, no gears. Hop on, twist the throttle and go.
Five days, a hundred kilometers a day, zero smoke
Vintaggio tours start and end in Pisa and cross the best of the region: Siena, San Gimignano, the villages that guidebooks often overlook. Each day covers 60 to 100 kilometers on routes designed by Max, who lived in Pisa and knows the best viewpoints, the right cafés and the roads where you won’t meet a soul.
And this is where our conversions shine: a fleet of vintage petrol Vespas, used intensively for days on end, is a constant source of surprises. Vespas electrified with the Retrokit kit, on the other hand, head out every morning and come back every evening, day after day, season after season. The support van with the spare Vespa still travels with the group, but its main job is carrying the luggage.
Then there’s a detail that anyone who has ridden a vintage Vespa will get right away: on an electric one, you can hear the landscape. The song of the cicadas along the gravel roads, the silence of a medieval village at lunchtime. Things that simply don’t exist with a two-stroke buzzing under the saddle.
When our kit becomes a profession
For us, the Vintaggio story counts double.
First, because it’s the toughest road test we could ask for: not a Sunday ride, but professional use, with mile after mile on the climbs and through the hot days of the Tuscan summer.
Second, because it captures what we mean when we talk about giving vintage Vespas a future. These Smallframes are more than fifty years old. Instead of sitting in a garage or struggling through inspections and traffic bans, today they make travelers from all over Europe fall in love with Tuscany. The design stays untouched, the history remains, the engine changes.
If you happen to be in the area and come across a group of colorful Vespas climbing toward San Gimignano without making a sound, now you know who they are.
