The Vespa, the helicopter and the Abruzzese genius

Engineer D'Ascanio was born in 1891 in Popoli, a small town in Abruzzo, and immediately revealed brilliant intelligence, flair, inventiveness and a great passion for flying.
From his first games as a boy, which saw him try his hand at building a glider, he never stopped researching, experimenting and devising technical solutions. To him we owe dozens of patents in the most diverse fields, but it is to the helicopter that he will dedicate the greatest commitment and research that lasted almost until the end of his days. After ups and downs, a period spent in the United States, a return to Italy, various attempts, from his tireless research he presented, on 7 April 1925, the patent for the helicopter with two coaxial propellers and an automatic slow descent device. He would continue to study, research and devise solutions around vertical flight, so much so that again in 1972, at the age of 81, he presented a new project to Fiat.
But D'Ascanio's name is linked to another product of his genius, the Vespa, the legendary two-wheeler known throughout the world, a success so vast that even today there are Vespa Clubs not only throughout Europe, but from the United States to South Africa, from Taiwan to Turkey, from Russia to Japan.
He arrived at this success almost by chance, he who had always been involved in anything else and had never ridden a motorbike. Piaggio commissioned him to work on a motorbike project. When he presented the prototype to Dr. Piaggio in 1946, engineer D'Ascanio probably didn't think that it would change the habits of Italians by giving them the chance to get around and move like never before. In fact, the Vespa soon became a symbol of freedom in post-war Italy, of the reborn will to live, certainly spreading among the young, but widely used by families for Sunday outings.
Beautiful and innovative, the Vespa was, and still is, a scooter that can be ridden by everyone, and its success was such that in ten years one million units were sold, staggering numbers for those times,
For its 70th birthday, the Vespa was celebrated just about everywhere, but especially in Popoli, where Vespa Clubs came together from the most diverse locations, testifying to the great vitality and topicality of the scooter invented by the ingenious D'Ascanio.