Chapter 1: Buying the Scoot

Wow, what a week. Right now it's about 12 AM here, but I'm about to leave Secugnago and I figured I'd better write a blog. Also, I'm wide awake thanks to my awesome possum Air BnB host offering me espresso an hour ago after our approx. 3 hour-long dinner. Anyways, I'll give you guys a quick rundown of what went down.

So to start out, I stayed in Secugnago - it's a small city in Lombardy and about an hour outside Milan. Getting to the Secugnago from Malpensa was an adventure in and of itself, but I'll save that story for a rainy day. All you really need to know is that I got in around 1 AM, which wasn't great because I was meeting Carlo - my Italian Vespa aficionado - in Melegnano at 8 AM the next morning. Speaking of Carlo, he is an absolute character. His garage consisted of no less than three Vespas, two Mopeds, and one go-kart. He doesn't speak any English, nor I Italian, yet he talked to me in Italian the entire time. He is the nicest guy in the world and I still can't believe the lengths he went to help make my trip possible.

The major problem we ran into was this: under Italian law, foreigners can own vehicles, but they can't get insured without an international drivers license, which I didn't have. I figured that it just wasn't going to happen then - after all, when you hit a bureaucratic wall in the US that's pretty much the end of it. In Italy, on the other hand, hitting the wall is just the first stop in an eight-hour-long journey from friend to friend to see who knows how to get around it. And that's exactly what we did. We went from Carlo's scooter club President to his mechanic to his parts dealer, back to his president then to his mom's house and, finally, to an insurance agency where somebody finally spoke English and could tell me what the heck was going on.

The Vespa parts store, one of many stops we made 

Basically, I couldn't get my own insurance in Italy, but what I could do was get onto Carlo's insurance and ride the scooter as an adjunct. The only problem here was that if anything was to happen to the scooter Carlo would be liable. So we ended up making a good old-fashioned Italian handshake agreement - I would pay for the scooter, he would officially own it, I would be liable for any damages, and he would agree to sell the Vespa for me so long as I brought it back to Melegnano. Oof dah! Or, as Carlo said multiple times throughout the day, ay yi yi!

Talk about starting a trip off with a bang. I'm heading to Genoa tomorrow morning, I'll probably write another blog my last day there. Ciao ciao for now.