The Vehicles of Rome

"Thelma Senza Luise"  Combination of a car and a scooter. By LAC 68, Nomentana station. 

While scurrying from one Rome "destination" to another, it's easy to miss the cool stuff that's all around you: the beautifully designed manhole covers, a wall of graffiti that celebrates a neighborhood's politics and local hero, the tiny dogs that Romans favor, the woman who's feeding cats, trees trimmed so thoroughly you're sure they'll never grow back, one unbelievable mound of garbage after another. 

And the vehicles. Romans--and the tourists they sometimes revile--get around the Eternal City in a variety of (for the observer, anyway) entertaining ways. Here are a few we've seen over the years:

A very long delivery bicycle, 2016

Now there's a load. 2013

For transporting children. Via del Corso. 

For transporting tired dogs

This guy's delivering for Frutteria Aloise. The vehicle is a weird one--a scooter of sorts
with a wide platform, small wheels, and no seat (and no helmet required). 2017.

And here's a delivery guy taking his bicycle up from the Metro.

Looks like a waiter transporting garbage, but I'm open to other interpretations. 2015

Sicily. Man delivering melons in a crate. Photos of Toto and (apparently) JFK. 2016. 

        Delivery, and delivery vehicles, are important enough that there are paintings of the them.

via Quatro Venti, 2016

2016. Neo-futurism. Not in a gallery. 

The mail has to be delivered, too, and in Rome it's usually by scooter, rather than truck. 

Woman delivering the mail. San Paolo, Rome, 2016.

Rome is a dense city and many of the streets are narrow. So there are lots of small vehicles.

Small yellow car. Dianne at right. 2016.

Bill, wondering if it's safe to drive. 2010. Looks the door is made of canvas.

The Ape is a common delivery vehicle, especially in rural areas. 3 wheels.

2016

Big guy with small bike. 2016.

Unlike Los Angeles and other American cities, Rome has not yet been populated by food trucks. However, all kinds of items, from clothing to batteries, are sold out of cars and small trucks. 

Mondo Arancina. A 3-wheeler. The drawing on the side depicts an historic battle. 

Ladies' garments. 2016. 

Small delivery boy, 2016. Life is hard.

Common sight: Woman with grocery shopping cart. 2016.

Scooters and motorcycles are common in Rome, to say the least. There are about 1 million of them. Less common is a fallen scooter or motorcycle. This one is unusual, in that there's a note on it, written by a passer-by, that says who did it and gives the license number of the offending owner's vehicle. 

2018

Tourists relaxing on their Segways, the Quirinale, 2016.

A rental scooter. This one is a 3-wheeler (two in front). Safer, but not safe. 

A scary sight: tourists on red rental scooters, crossing the Ponte Sublicio, 2018. 

Rome's latest transport scourge is the E-scooter. 

Guy with dog collecting iron with cart in Pigneto. You can't do that with an e-scooter.

Delivery guy on E-scooter

E-scooters. Helmets were not required; they may be now.

Bill

(and from Dianne - if you haven't had enough, try searching for "scooter" in RST, and you'll see more than 150 posts; trucks, more than 50 - for a start)

Decorated Rome

There's a hard side to Rome, and a soft side.  The hard side is crazy traffic, failed mass transit, and a politics built on division and conflict, dating back to the Fascists and Partisans of the World War, the bitter and violent Anni di Piombo of the 1970s, and today, differences over gender, race, and immigration.

The soft side is romantic and seductive: the Trevi Fountain, Trastevere in a light drizzle, comfortable restaurants and seductive cafes.

On the soft side, but less noticeable, is a Roman fondness for informal decoration.  We've noticed this aspect of Rome many times over the years.  Here are some soft-side images from 2019, 2018, and 2017.

Monteverde Vecchio: nursery guy does this with his truck:

In Aurelia, an older woman--perhaps homeless, more likely just eccentric, but clearly a fixture in the neighborhood--had decorated this seatless bicycle more or less as a shrub, with a basket of plants and flowers off the back tire:

    Fancy paint job:

    Another fancy paint job:

   A sidewalk stairway in Trastevere, in all its crocheted glory:

Red umbrellas as driveway decoration, Prati

A small commercial truck, with an historical theme:

The scooter windshield of a Roma fan who hates Juventus (sometimes there's a hard side to the soft side):

And last, cheating a bit because it's Sicily, not Rome--a melon vendor looking back to JFK (2016):

Bill

Truck Shopping in Rome

The 'shop'  name is "Melandra...Moving Shop." The "ape" or "bee" is a
3-wheel commercial vehicle, based on the Vespa scooter and produced,
as is the Vespa ("wasp"), by Piaggio.  I once said we mainly saw them in
the countryside, but maybe not!

The joys of shopping in Rome, for us, are mainly the visuals.  We love looking at the multitude of ways in which petty capitalism operates in this city of 3 million people. A method new to us this year was the mobile clothes store.  Yes, we have pop-ups in the U.S., but the Italians as usual, take it one step further.



We had seen vendors selling batteries (see photo towards the end of this post), glasses, flowers, fruits and vegetables out of trucks.  But a mini clothing store? That was new.


The "ape" trucks  above and below were parked in and close by the large Piazza Mazzini near our apartment this Spring, and came around periodically to sell their wares - and the Italians were buying.

Quite a combination of Italian and English words here, plus a take off : "Fruit of the Loom" (right), then "Fruit on the Road" (left). We didn't check  to see if the goods were authentic or knock-offs, but we can guess.

Below, not a shopping truck per se, but likely a delivery truck for a Sicilian (mostly) take-out restaurant in Prati (near where we lived).  Unfortunately, we never got there, but the arancini look amazing! (To say "arancini" are stuffed rice balls doesn't do them justice.)

The paintings are of Orlando and Rinaldo dueling for Angelica's heart in the classic "Orlando Furioso"
tale.  The story resonates with Sicily and the Sicilian puppet tradition, emphasizing these arancini
are going to be Sicilian to their rice core. The restaurant name is MondoArancina - with an "a" at the end,
 apparently the Sicilian spelling. The truck enlivens an otherwise rather soulless piazza in della Vittoria.

And then there's the use of a Fiat 500 to sell vinegars--again, just down from our apartment.

"Wine without sulfites...Wine and apple vinegar..." etc.
And, apparently, he doubles as a clown at night.

This van houses an Orologeria, a store that sells watch-bands and watch batteries.
A piazza in San Paolo.  Eager customers, including me. 

And, left, not exactly shopping from or out of a truck, but shoe sellers who use their truck to carry all the shoes and the stands and tents they put up to sell - they do this every day of the week - up in the morning, down in the evening.

I thought the arrangement of shoe boxes could have stumped a Rubik's cube expert.

Dianne

Bill has also written about some of Rome's trucks and vans:
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2012/02/tiny-trucks-of-rome.html
https://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2011/08/white-vans-of-rome.html

The Tiny Trucks of Rome

In the U.S., where bigger is always better, nobody wants a truck that isn't capable of hauling an apartment building or, if need be, the Statue of Liberty.  See photo at left.



In Italy "small" has long been in fashion.  In the towns and countryside, tiny, 3-wheeled vehicles, often flatbeds, many of them running on noisy and polluting but powerful 2-cycle engines (mixing gas with oil) that are prohibited in the cities, carry wood, produce, building supplies, and sundries.  They're slow--they don't do more than about 30 mph--but they're inexpensive to operate, easy to fix, and for the farmers and tradesmen that use them, they're big enough to get the job done. 

Easy to park--here, in space reserved for scooters,
in front of the Italian House of Deputies (Montecitorio).

Small truck-like vehicles are common in Rome--again, partly because they're cheaper to operate than bigger trucks or vans, but also because parking space is at a premium and traffic insane.  They're not scooters, but they offer some of the same advantages. 

A three-wheeler.  Careful on the turns!

Many of these smaller trucks have only 3 wheels--sometimes 1 in front and 2 in back (unstable on turns) and, less often, 2 in front and 1 in back (better on turns, but more unstable generally). 

4-wheel Postal vehicle

The Ufficio Postale, the Italian postal service, is a big user of these vehicles for its pick-up and delivery services.  The one at left is a 4-wheeled model with small rear wheels and what appears to be a detachable door. 

This one belongs to a restaurant.  Dianne's there
for proportion. 

Others are owned by private businesses, from restaurants to flea-market vendors. 
(Ciarla, where we had dinner one evening, is on Via Appia Nuova). 

We thought about buying one to help us with the task of distributing copies of Rome the Second Time.

Unidentified trucks attract graffiti.  But then,
so does everything. 

Unmarked mini-trucks appear to be a prime target of beginning graffiti writers, practicing their "tags." 

Bill

A small flat-bed, used for hauling goods to a flea market.