Entrepreneurial Vision and Consumer Sovereignty in Enrico Piaggio – Un sogno italiano

Beyond the film itself, the Vespa has long stood as a powerful symbol of youthful freedom, modern Italian design, and the democratization of mobility. One need only recall the iconic scene from Roman Holiday³ in which Audrey Hepburn, as a princess briefly escaping her royal duties, zips through the streets of Rome on a Vespa with Gregory Peck. Comic chaos ensues—wrong turns, café table collisions, and even a police chase—yet the pair evade consequence as they pursue adventure. The scene effectively introduced the Vespa as a global icon.

Who can say how Hollywood director William Wyler actually came to feature the Vespa in Roman Holiday? In Enrico Piaggio, however, the screenwriters poignantly made Piaggio himself imagine the scooter’s cinematic potential. It is 1952, and the Piaggio company is in crisis after the rise of a competing scooter brand that has begun to dominate the market. Overhearing his secretaries excitedly discuss an upcoming American production to be filmed in Rome, Piaggio’s entrepreneurial instinct immediately recognizes the opportunity and leads him to envision the Vespa on the big screen. The stakes are high: this media coup may be the firm’s last chance for survival. Much of the film’s present-​day narrative unfolds from this decisive insight, as Piaggio, with the assistance of his secretary Susanna “Suso” Vannucci, undertakes a mission to persuade Wyler to feature the Vespa in his film. Suso’s encounter with the American journalist Peter Panetta at Cinecittà provides the narrative frame through which she—and later Piaggio himself—recounts the Vespa’s creation and early years, allowing the viewer to observe Piaggio’s entrepreneurial mindset and feats across both past and present.

Piaggio’s role as entrepreneur is established from the film’s opening scenes leading up to this pivotal moment. Piaggio is introduced waking up on his office couch, papers still resting on his chest, his gaze turning to a portrait of his father, the businessman who founded the company in 1884. This is the first of several scenes in which Piaggio, alone in his office, is shown to identify deeply with the firm and to brood over its future.⁴ Upon entering the factory, he greets everyone by name and asks after one man’s sick wife, engaging the workers as individuals rather than as an anonymous collective. When a communist union representative confronts him with rumors of a financial crisis due to declining sales, Piaggio responds: “It just takes finding an idea to sell the Vespas.” Finding ideas, he later makes clear, is how he understands the entrepreneurial function itself: “As father used to say, an entrepreneur must always invent something—otherwise, what kind of entrepreneur is he?”

From the outset, the film portrays Piaggio not only as an inventive entrepreneur but also as a figure of exemplary moral character. The earliest flashbacks establish that his concern for his employees extends beyond the bounds of any merely contractual relationship. In 1944, when Nazi and Fascist soldiers attempt to deport his Jewish workers to German concentration camps, Piaggio intervenes without hesitation, confronting the armed soldiers and refusing to stand aside. He does not flinch even when a gun is pointed at him. When the soldier fires, Piaggio is critically wounded but survives. As a consequence of his defiance, the workers and their families are spared. After the end of the war the following year, Piaggio and these same families are shown laboring side by side to rebuild the factory, reduced to rubble by Allied bombings. It is here that Piaggio encounters Suso as she brings flowers in memory of her parents, victims of the air raids. Genuinely concerned for her well-​being, Piaggio asks whether she has found work and offers her a position as his secretary on the spot. His compassion is palpable, yet rather than mere consolation or charity, he provides opportunity. By insisting that she also complete her studies in fine arts, he affirms an individualism grounded in the recognition of others as individuals with unique aspirations and talents. Suso’s intelligence and loyalty ultimately justify his trust in her.

As Mises outlines in Human Action, a market economy comprises several logically distinct functions beyond the entrepreneurial role itself, including the provision of capital, technical and managerial execution, labor, ownership of natural resources, and consumption—even though these roles may be combined in the same individual in practice.⁵ The film repeatedly depicts the interplay amongst these functions. To rebuild his factory, Piaggio must first of all secure capital. One of the film’s most pointed scenes unfolds at the Prefecture, where Piaggio has applied for government funding available for reconstruction. Instead, he receives an offer of funding for a fictitious “project study” that would channel the grant to insiders while ensuring that no factory is rebuilt. When Piaggio asks what the office actually produces, the Commissioner of Reconstruction replies bluntly: “Salaries for certain people, people who know how to help each other.” Piaggio vehemently refuses. The scene thus delivers a sharp critique of entrenched political power, contrasting state-​dependent opportunism with entrepreneurial responsibility in a free market.

With the Commission for Reconstruction proving useless, Piaggio turns to a banker acquaintance, Cosimo Rocchi-​Battaglia, for the capital needed to relaunch his business. In this case, however, the interests of investor and entrepreneur are sharply misaligned. Although the banker proclaims that “banks are founded on trust,” he will repeatedly prove duplicitous. Behind Piaggio’s back, the bank president confides to the Commissioner that the loan was granted not out of confidence in Piaggio’s success, but as a stratagem to seize control of the brand.

Meanwhile, as head of the family firm in Pontedera, Piaggio reviews the inventory with his workers, seeking to repurpose higher-​order goods like leftover airplane parts spared from the bombings.⁶ When he asks what can be done with the small motors, a worker’s response prompts him to rely on his own imagination to envision a new possibility. He convenes the engineers and department heads for joint reflection. Attentive to the concrete needs of postwar Italy—with its devastated infrastructure and a population eager to rebuild—he insists that the nation’s recovery depends on mobility. From this insight, he conceives a compact, affordable scooter that anyone can drive, including women, thus offering to all the kind of locomotion previously restricted to the few wealthy enough to own an automobile. By redirecting production from wartime aeronautics to this accessible vehicle, Piaggio aims to revive both his company and Italian society.

What follows is a period of experimentation in which factory managers and technicians attempt to transform Piaggio’s original idea into a workable product. The first prototype, however, quickly proves flawed: when Piaggio asks Suso to try it, he finds that the design makes it impossible for women to mount without lifting their skirts. Declaring that “we are in a democracy now, everyone has the right to sit comfortably,” Piaggio decides to seek technical expertise beyond the firm. He presents the problem to Corradino D’Ascanio (1891–1981), an aeronautical engineer at the University of Pisa, asking this inventor of the modern helicopter to shift his focus to a modest motorized scooter. As Piaggio explains, people no longer need machines of war, but vehicles to get to work. Although D’Ascanio has a distaste for motorcycles, he is nonetheless intrigued by the challenge. His immediate redesign of the model on his blackboard suggests that his deep knowledge of mechanics and creative thinking will resolve all the technical and practical problems of the prototype. A subsequent montage shows collaborative production in the factory, from Piaggio and D’Ascanio to the workers welding the parts.

Once the new model is ready, Piaggio personally tests it on the nearby country roads. He arrives at the home of the widow Paola Bechi Luserna (1918–1994), who later becomes his wife, and invites her to take a spin. When she asks to drive the scooter herself, she demonstrates that the vehicle is intuitive and inclusive—a product truly for everyone. Significantly, the first person shown driving the scooter after Piaggio is a woman, emblematic of the consumer whose satisfaction, as Mises emphasizes, governs production.⁷ And thus the Vespa is born.

Yet the invention of a pioneering product does not guarantee success. When the Italian American journalist assumes that “the rest of the road was all downhill,” Piaggio corrects him, remarking that “Italy is always an uphill climb.” The narrative underscores that running a thriving business is not a matter of a single brilliant idea, but rather a relentless response to challenges.⁸ No matter how ingenious the product, it cannot succeed if consumers do not buy it. Initially, despite public enthusiasm and the Vespa’s clear appeal, sales remain insufficient to sustain production.

Since during this early period Piaggio has fallen behind on payments, the banker demands immediate repayment of the entire loan—an obviously impossible condition. When he insists that the only remaining option is to relinquish the company, Piaggio responds that he would rather sell his own possessions to pay his outstanding debt. Despite the banker’s cynical claim that it will be impossible to find buyers for such valuables, the next scene shows Piaggio selling his antique car and a painting by the Renaissance master Raphael to an appreciative American couple.

Meanwhile, the conspiracy between the banker and the commissioner becomes clear: their goal is not only to seize the Piaggio brand but also to exploit the government reconstruction funds for personal gain—the same fraudulent scheme Piaggio had earlier refused. Motivated purely by greed, they seek no productive value. The situation worsens when the workers call a strike and occupy the factory, only two months after the start of production, because the Vespas aren’t selling.

A meeting is called with the mayor and representatives of the workers in which Piaggio is cast as the antagonist in a perceived confrontation between i padroni (the bosses) and gli operai (the workers). The two courses of action the mayor proposes to Piaggio—either seeking out the Commissioner of Reconstruction or handing the business over to his creditors—are not feasible options, as we know. Nonetheless, the men in the room express their approval. Piaggio reminds them that the historical success of the company led to improved living standards—under his father, the workforce grew from one hundred to ten thousand in just seven years, transforming Pontedera into a small city with roads, houses, schools, and daycare. Still, Piaggio does not claim all the credit: “We built something together,” he recollects, “and the war took it away from us.” His words underscore how private enterprise can generate broad social benefits yet remain vulnerable to political threats such as war.⁹ Piaggio concludes that when he is unable to pay their salaries, he will do as they say. At the present moment, his plan is to mount an intensive advertising campaign to “get into the hearts of the Italians.”

When Piaggio learns from his accountant that funds are nearly depleted, he sees no option but mass layoffs, a painful prospect given the generational ties many employees have to the company. In another private office moment, the portrait of Piaggio’s father appears to watch him sternly, emphasizing the immense responsibility he bears toward the workers. At his lowest point, he visits his future wife Paola for moral support. She reminds him that leadership demands faith in one’s vision because others entrust their destinies to the one with the greatest dream: “I believe that a leader must first of all have faith in himself—precisely because others entrust their destinies to him, and perhaps they do so because they know he alone has the greatest dream and is also the only one capable of realizing it.” The burden is on him to find a solution—not only for himself and the workers, but also for the countless Italians who are in need of his product.

The following morning at the factory initially evokes the rhetoric of class struggle as Piaggio arrives at the occupied building. The workers first deny him entry, shouting words of solidarity (“tutti uniti”) among the compagni (comrades). Yet when the workers eventually allow him to speak, Piaggio articulates his vision of the factory as a voluntary community united by shared purpose and consensual economic relations. He reveals that he had prepared dismissal notices but could not bring himself to fire his employees, mindful of the impact on them and their families. Emphasizing jobs, dignity, and continuity, he reframes cooperation as the alternative to class conflict. He recounts what Paola had told him the night before, about a midwife saving up to buy a Vespa so she could reach patients more easily. Piaggio proposes a radical solution: selling scooters on installment plans. As Mises argued, entrepreneurs ultimately serve the sovereign consumer, and Piaggio again devises a solution centered on consumer needs. When warned of the risk that customers may default, he responds confidently: “Italians only want to work and pay their debts; we must trust them.” Inside and outside the factory, trust replaces coercion. Unlike the banker, Piaggio’s approach fosters mutually beneficial exchange. In response, the workers resume production.

Yet the Vespa’s success does not confer monopoly. The Lambretta, launched in 1947, quickly gains market share, underscoring a central feature of the free market: competition. The banker treats competition as a sign of impending failure—“When you have a competitor, things are bound to go badly”—revealing his fundamentally anti-​market mindset. In reality, competition is intrinsic to the market, rewarding producers who best satisfy consumer demand while simultaneously spurring innovation.¹⁰ This dynamic is dramatized in the film. When Peter asks Suso how Piaggio responded to the Lambretta challenge, she replies that “sometimes the ideas are under your nose—you just need to see them.” Suso’s comment introduces a scene from 1947 in which Piaggio notices a worker pulling boxes behind the scooter and suddenly envisions a new product: a compact vehicle for transporting small-​scale cargo. “We’ve mobilized people,” he remarks, “now we need to move goods as well, don’t we?” Thus, the Ape (“Bee”) was born to accompany the Vespa (“Wasp”).

While the film repeatedly highlights Piaggio’s unique ability to transform everyday occurrences into the catalyst for previously nonexistent realities, the introduction of the three-​wheeled commercial Ape specifically mirrors an earlier scene in which Piaggio watches a young girl riding a scooter and conceives the Vespa itself. These moments may recall Israel Kirzner’s concept of entrepreneurial alertness—the capacity to discover previously overlooked profit opportunities.¹¹ Alternatively, following Peter Klein, they may be understood not as the discovery or creation of opportunities but as their imaginative projection: the exercise of judgment over the use of resources under uncertainty¹² and the action that flows from such judgment.¹³¹⁴ Ultimately, the film presents Piaggio as an entrepreneur who combines alertness to new possibilities with decisive judgment under conditions of uncertainty.

Despite Piaggio’s constant exercise of “keen judgment, foresight, and energy,”¹⁵ the situation in Pontedera remains precarious. The banker still actively schemes to undermine him, contacting other financial institutions to block additional credit that could have enabled him to meet his obligations and conspiring with Piaggio’s ex-​lover to ruin him financially and personally. In a final attempt to sink Piaggio, the banker offers a bribe to the American journalist recently befriended by Suso, hoping to delay an article about the Vespa until after the company collapses. The journalist, however, later tears up the check—demonstrating that not everyone can be corrupted. He goes on to publish the article in Life, titled “An Italian Miracle,” celebrating “a man who fights to make his dream come true” and thereby increasing public interest in the Vespa.

Near the film’s end, Piaggio personally visits Cinecittà in Rome with Suso and the journalist to present his idea to director William Wyler. Without revealing the climactic scene, we might nonetheless note that Piaggio’s stratagem to showcase the Vespa on the film set once again demonstrates entrepreneurial quick thinking and decisive action. His ensuing success in securing the Vespa’s appearance in Roman Holiday sends sales soaring, saving the company through personal ingenuity despite the collusion of the banker, the commissioner, and their accomplices.

It is worth noting that the banker is not a historical individual but a composite character, drawing on several real-​life figures who sought to obstruct Piaggio’s efforts. The film deliberately casts him as the antagonist: a corrupt rent-​seeker who attempts to extract profit through duplicitous means rather than productive activity. Piaggio, by contrast, embodies productive capitalism. He seeks to build something useful and treats workers as partners in value creation. Whereas the banker operates through collusion with political power and financial manipulation, Piaggio competes in open markets by solving real problems. The film thus draws a sharp distinction between wealth generated through entrepreneurship and wealth accumulated through proximity to power—a distinction too often blurred in debates about capitalism. At the same time, Piaggio is portrayed as a compassionate individual as well as an alert businessman, underscoring the compatibility of ethics and entrepreneurship and illustrating how voluntary economic action can contribute to social reconstruction.

Although Piaggio’s death is not depicted in the film, historical sources report that thousands attended his funeral. The entire city of Pontedera mourned the man whose name had become inseparable from Italy’s postwar revival—a testament to his legacy as both innovator and humanist. The scale of the mourning reflects not only the admiration of employees whose livelihoods he sustained, but also the esteem of the wider public, for whom he stood as a symbol of hope and progress in the difficult years following World War II.

The film’s subtitle, Un sogno italiano, recalls that Piaggio’s dream of providing affordable mobility to ordinary Italians was aligned with a broader national aspiration for economic and social renewal. The success of the Vespa not only coincided with, but materially contributed to, the period of rapid growth later known as the “Italian miracle.” The subtitle also echoes the better-​known “American Dream,” the belief that individuals can flourish through initiative, effort, and personal responsibility in a society that permits the free pursuit of economic opportunity.

To this day, the Vespa remains a symbol of personal freedom—from its origins as a practical instrument of individual agency during postwar hardship to its continued production as a beloved and functional vehicle. The Piaggio factory in Pontedera has produced Vespas uninterruptedly from 1946, and by the scooter’s seventy-​fifth anniversary in 2021, approximately nineteen million units had been sold worldwide.¹⁶ Since 1949, Vespa Clubs have offered enthusiasts the chance to interact and explore new places together (museopi​ag​gio​.it/​e​n​/​v​e​s​p​a​-club), while the Piaggio Museum, inaugurated in 2000, had welcomed nearly 950,000 visitors by 2023 (museopi​ag​gio​.it). This enduring legacy testifies to how one entrepreneur’s vision transformed countless lives through mobility, choice, and personal freedom.

Released in 2019 amid Italy’s governmental instability, mounting public debt, and drowning bureaucracy, Enrico Piaggio – Un sogno italiano offers a pointed reminder of what individual inventiveness, entrepreneurial courage, and market intelligence can achieve. Progress, the film suggests, does not arise from state planning or subsidies—depicted as breeding grounds for inertia and fraud—but from entrepreneurial judgment responding to real human needs. As Doug French aptly observes, “All of the wonderful goods and services that we enjoy are due to entrepreneurship and the firms that are created to carry out the dreams of the entrepreneur and serve customers.”¹⁷ Piaggio’s Italian dream, inseparable from the country’s postwar renewal, thus stands as a compelling testament to the power of free individuals acting in free markets.

The film drew approximately 5.7 million viewers when it first aired on Rai 1 in 2019 and is currently available outside Italy, with Italian audio and English subtitles, through various streaming and rental platforms.