The Italian Campaign
THE ITALIAN CAMPAIGN
Dainese party in the Dolomites with Ago and friends! Oh, and we rode a couple of Moto Morinis, too...
JOHN BURNS
THERE’S NOTHING I DESPISE MORE ABOUT MODERN MOTOjournalism than the part where somebody comes up with a thinly veiled excuse to jet off to the Alps to ride around for a week, as if that’s just the type of thing Joe Moto needs to be informed about—as commonplace an activity as lubing your chain or... What’s that? Excuse me? The Dainese/AGV Legendary Italian Tour Contest? Three days of riding around the Dolomites with my old friend Ago, his pals Lucky Luchinelli and Max Biaggi plus 40 lucky contest winners from around the world in complimentary Italian gear on complimentary Italian bikes? Oh, the world needs to know about this! Count me in!
Besides, this trip to Italy is no junket; in this particular case, I’d be performing some actual motojournalism—bringing back riding impressions of the not-available-in-America Moto Morinis: the Corsaro 1200, 1200 Sport, Granpasso and Scrambler. Okay, let’s get the motojournalism part out of the way first: The Morinis are all great bikes!
My digs on the first night—at the Hotel Michelangelo in the hills above Vicenza—were a tad cramped, and if this reflects the state of the current motorcycle economy, then things are even more dire than we thought. The Morettis at the hotel bar were fresh and chilled, but when I ordered up a pizza (8 euros), my expectations of something wood-fired None of that mattered, though, as all 60-some of us blasted out of Dainese HQ the next morning, a thundering yet well-dressed rabble of motojournalists, Dainese dealers and
contest winners riding on a warehouse full of Ducatis, MV Agustas and Moto Morinis. Prego\ (If you’re in Vicenza, you definitely need to stop by the huge Dainese outlet; Marina, the fashion editor from Milano who rode pillion on various motorcycles throughout the trip, picked up an excellent skiing outfit on the cheap, and the Dainese museum is cool, too.) I hopped on a Morini Corsaro and got rolling, gave the front brake a little test squeeze on the smooth concrete warehouse floor and almost crashed on take-off. Ah, okay, inhale...
All the Morinis are powered by the same 1187cc liquidcooled 87-degree V-Twin, and in the Corsaro it’s a seriously torquey beast that makes its best power before 9000 rpm,
which you really might not expect since its 107mm bore is 1mm bigger than that of a Ducati 1198. Whatever’s going on with the Corsaro’s valves and cams and 54mm throttle bodies, it makes midrange power that feels like it would bury the typical Monster 1100, which is saying something. The rest of the bike, not so much-a. Actually, the rest of it works fine, too, but the gearboxes in the Corsaros I rode were not up to current standards, requiring lots of pressure to shift,
often needing multiple stabs at the lever and with neutral impossible to find with the engine running—which might not be such a big problem if you weren’t riding with 59 other people and three chase vehicles. In fact, the obligatory crash occurred when an English-speaking journalist, attempting to shift from first to second with the front wheel in the air, found neutral instead and wound up in a Venetian canal. Most interestingly, the new engine was designed by Franco Lambertini, the same veteran ingegnere who designed Morini’s last V-Twin engine way back in the early
Seventies—the 344cc 72-degree Twin of the Moto Morini 3/2 (see “Club Morini” sidebar, page 50). That engine lumbered on through various iterations, growing to power such idiosyncratic things as the 1981 Camel 500 (sort of adventure bikeish), and according to Wikipedia, was considered by (who else?) Harley-Davidson to power a small Hog in the mid-Eighties. Also according to Wikipedia, company founder Alfonso Morini died in 1969, which handed the company over to his daughter Gabriella, who sold out to Cagiva in 1986. Ten years later, Morini was acquired by Texas Pacific and fresh-mozzarellaed were rudely dashed upon the presentation of a pie which had been at less than 0 degrees Celsius just minutes prior. Group, along with Ducati. In 1999, a company called Morini Franco Motori—a firm founded by Alfonso Morini’s nephew, Franco—bought the Moto Morini name back and rolled out the first Corsaro 1200 in 2005.
Anyway, Morini’s Twin is an interesting engine that appears to be really robusto. Instead of vertically split cases, the Morini block is a single big casting, with the crank inserted from the side for easy servicing. Why 87 degrees? For easier packaging, supposedly, or maybe just to be different? Whatever the reason, the Morini motor sounds and feels not unlike a 90-degree Twin. The increased crankcase stiffness means the engine can also bear more structural load, and all the Morinis also share the same basic Verlicchi-built steel trellis frame—looking only slightly derivative of another famous Italian bike manufacturer’s. Okay, a lot like it.
In fact, the Corsaro feels like nothing as much as a faster, firmer-suspended, heavier Monster that needs its gearbox looked at. And after a few corners chasing your new Euro friends, you learn to deal with the gearbox, too, and you learn to like the thing quite a bit mostly because of the monstrous torque it produces starting really low in the powerband. On the tight Dolomite mountain roads we rode, everybody was fighting for the Corsaros and Hypermotards and Brutales over the MV Agusta F4s. Hmmm...
The latest thing the Euros find amusing about us Americans is the size of our coffees. Well, I find it annoying how quickly you drain their little espressos, and how long it takes the barrista to make you the next one when there’s a crowd at the bar. A latte is a reasonable compromise. What we can all agree on, though, is smoking like chimneys. Ahhhh, every stop is like a North Carolina barn fire. When in Rome... (Then, once back in California where smoking will soon be a felony, it’s easy to quit again.) Now that I’m an old hand at being assaulted and insulted in the world’s capitals, I think smoking has become my favorite part of going to Europe. Or was it the excellent grappa we had for lunch on day one, at the Marzadro Grappa Factory? Just a taste, of course. Cheers.
What the heck, it’s easier to be a little fatalistic in the Dolomites. I didn’t know what an Ossario was but found out at the Pasubio First World War Sacrarium on the way to Pian delle Fugazze: When there were too many bodies to bury in the rocky ground up there in the mountains, they built a big stone monument and just piled them up inside, so that when you walk inside and peek through the carved apertures in the granite walls, shiny skulls and bones look back at you; slightly eerie if you’re not expecting it. This is the country, of course, Ernie Hemingway made famous in “A Farewell to Arms,” but as our Greek journalist friend Vassily points out via his slightly longer view of history, they’ve been fighting over this ground since time began, and it’s easy to see why. The signs are in Italian, but the little villages you keep riding through look like non-anal-retentive versions of Swiss ones, and the roads keep twisting up and down through deciduous, coniferous and no trees at all, then back down again, and in between the trees are the kind of picturebook farms and streams and cows from your childhood dreams.
The Morini Granpasso is passable if you like the adventure-touring look, but on these smooth, tight roads, what you really want is the Morini 1200 Sport or the Scrambler. All three bikes share a 117-horsepower version of the big V-Twin, which feels just as powerful as the 140-horse model most of the time—and, come to think of it, they shift a bit better, too. The Sport and Scrambler also have wider handlebars and footpegs that are lower and farther forward than those of the Corsaro, which makes them easier to flog on tight roads and more comfortable nearly all the time.
They also get very cool flat-track-inspired side pipes and spoked wheels with black Excel rims—17 inchers for the 1200 Sport, and a 19/17-inch combo for the Scrambler, very “Great Escape” looking.
On the way to San Pellegrino, we sample the famous mineral water from its source: the sky. It poured down upon us for an hour or more. Luckily, I had a nice rainsuit in the chase van, way behind somewhere in the dark. But the high-tech liner in my beautiful new Dainese Santa Monica jacket actually did keep my core dry and warmish, and the Patagonia polypropylene long johns I sprang for like 20 years ago were soaked but kept me warm anyway. How’s that work? Maybe it was the grappa...
Day two as we ascend into the mountains, the morning drizzle turns to rain and we turn into a cozy ristorante for more coffee, then more tobacco on the front porch as we watch the rain turn to snow. Dammit. It’s fun to ride back down the snowy mountain road behind Max Biaggi, on his booming Aprilia RSV4 with Marina balanced upon its abbreviated tailsection—a tailsection, says somebody, perfect for a Greek sailor. I have no idea what that means, the Greeks nod their agreement.
It’s dinner with Giacomo Agostini on night two, along with a bunch more members of the international moto-press. With the Euros, Giacomo is a god. The first Daytona-inspired “Imola 200” happened in 1972, and by 1975, Imola was drawing more than 100,000 spectators to watch Ago battle it out against Kenny Roberts, Barry Sheene and the usual cast of colorful period characters. To many Euros, Imola was like an annual moto-Woodstock, and today Ago is a living Jimi Hendrix, happily signing autographs on every surface presented to him. He tells a few of the same stories from our last meeting at the 2008 Legends of the Motorcycle in California (“Ago & Friends” CW, November, 2008), but that’s cool because I’d forgotten most of them. Trivia time: What bike did Ago win his first championship upon? A Moto Morini! Ago was Italian Cadet Champion in 1962, Italian Junior Champion in 1963 and was in fact hired by Count Alfonso Morini himself, a thing I wish I had known at dinner, which would have fleshed this story out nicely. Dammit. (CW inside information: Somebody in the know says MV Agusta’s next bike will be a Triple.)
The rain and fog hanging low over our storybook Dolomite village that night looks like it’s just going to continue, but everybody seems to be having a great time anyway, the food and wine and beer and cigarettes and conversation keep flowing in a cozy moto-tower of Babel, about 70 percent of which is English. If you can only have one language, make it English! Everybody wants to make friends with the new Motociclismo Italia Motocross editor, who’s about 5-foot-5, very shapely, blue-eyed and pig-tailed and rides a very mean Hypermotard.
Day three, incredibly, dawns bright and sunny to reveal a huge, HD panorama of mountains with fresh snow all around our little village. Now that we’re a cohesive unit, it doesn’t take much time for all of us to mount up, and off we ride, tip-toeing carefully on the damp roads up some winding
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pass or another. The Euros are more accustomed to riding in wet conditions, the pace is actually pretty brisk, and on one tight uphill corner exit I nearly try on a Hypermotard as a hat. Woooohoooo!! Wide handlebars are good. We stop for a latte and a cigarette on top of a white, granite and sky-blue world which will be packed with skiers in a week or two, then it’s time to descend back to earth again; some people have planes to catch in Venice in the afternoon. An Italian pickpockets my Hypermotard, leaving me an MV Agusta F4, a bike best appreciated someplace like Autódromo Nationale Monza. Dammit!
As it turns out, the joke’s on the Italian thief. I take it way carefully on the first part of the wet hairpin descent, like moving a couch down flights of tight, slippery stairs, easy... but then the wet turns to damp, then dry, as we drop back down below the tree line—say, did that rock have horns? Oh, a cow!—tight hairpins loosen up, then become sweeping corners with exits where you can let the F4’s whirry/raspy radial-valve four cylinder breathe a little, oh yeah, I remember this bike now... Then the road starts to have a yellow stripe down the middle and a rushing river beside it, as it drains downward through narrow villages and tunnels and beautiful stone villas perched on the sides of lakes where the river was dammed probably 500 years ago. And suddenly, it’s one of those out-of-body motorcycle experiences.
The MV is a harsh mistress, but I’ve been dealing with her kind for decades now; my stringy muscles remember how to hang on without pain, and how to punish her back, a thing the MV likes very much. Faster is better. The Morini Scramblers and Hypermotards get sucked up and spat out on the straights in amazing yelps of rpm, and a couple fingers of front brake pull everything right back from warp speed. Hooo! This bike feels like it was made for this road. Then it occurs to me, yes, it actually was made for this road; the MV factory’s somewhere down where this river’s draining toward, probably the same river Hemingway’s Tenente jumped into to escape the war. Is it better to go fast through a blurry blue/green tunnel and enjoy the bike? Or slower and enjoy the scenery? Feels like I am doing both. Feels like I should just keep doing this and all my problems are behind me for good....
And just like that it’s all over, we run out of mountain, the road straightens out, it’s peacetime again. A late afternoon lunch on the Venetian plain, a little wine, and we return the bikes to the big Dainese warehouse in Vicenza under more drizzle. No wonder Venice keeps sinking. Shake hands and hugs, a kiss on both cheeks for the ladies. Ciao. Ciao-bellal And walk back to the hotel in the rain. It’s a long, long trip home. Œ
Moto Morini sadly filed for bankruptcy in Italy on September 24 last year, and its press contact seemed to be incommunicado as of this writing. Morini did, however, make it to the Milan Show in October, with a Motard 1200 and a mockup of a Corsaro 1200 S, and the latest word is that the company is up for sale.
