Word: lambrettas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...hood. Three old Citroëns, looking like something out of an old French police thriller, glided silently by with no fewer than 20 Vietnamese inside. For the ride from Hué to Danang, these families had paid $45, up from the normal fare of $9. A three-wheel Lambretta taxi designed for eight small people passed, carrying 16. A wheel fell off the axle, and everyone abandoned the taxi in the middle of the crowded highway...
...Industrialist Ferdinando Innocenti had an idea that put a nation on wheels. He made a stubby, inexpensive motor scooter: something more than a bike but less than a motorcycle. He called it the Lambretta, and Italians, too poor to buy autos, rapidly embraced it as their family vehicle. Premier Alcide de Gasperi boasted before he died that his regime had "given the motor scooter to the people." Pope Pius XII once publicly praised the motor scooters for "raising the level of life of the social categories who cannot buy more costly means of transport.'' Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini...
...however, Italians can afford to buy cars, and they are swapping their Lambrettas for compact Fiats. In 1970. only 55,000 Lambrettas were sold compared with 180,000 a decade earlier. Faced with the realities of a stronger economy, the late Innocenti's son and nephew, who now run his company, have stopped production of the Lambretta in Italy but will keep a parts depot. They are arranging a deal with the Indian government and a Bombay company to move Lambretta production to India beginning in 1974. The Innocenti firm will have a minority interest in the operation...
...Lambretta's Italian competitor, the Vespa, has also been hurt by the auto. But Vespas will continue to be produced at home, leaving the Italian people at least a whisper of a past...
...people who recognized Be on his return visit vanished after an investigating team headed by a North Vietnamese officer entered the village. The hamlet chief was blown to bits when he stepped on a mine outside his office. Another mine, detonated from ambush, killed eleven persons riding in a Lambretta minibus. Among the passengers: another cousin...