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If you’ve seen recent print ads and commercials for Absolut Vodka, American Eagle, Gap and Target, you might be asking yourself “Why are these corporations obsessed with using a small Italian motor scooter that was popular in the ’50s and ’60s to push their pique polos, versatile solutions for modern living and fermented grain alcohol?” A cynic would say marketing geniuses are selling baby boomers’ long-lost youth right back to them. Photographer Tom Neff has a more esoteric answer: “It seems to have some connection to an international-fashion-chic-cool aspect of culture.”

Studying photography my senior year at LSU, I never had Neff as a professor. But more often than not, he was managing the photo lab. Though we spoke only in passing, I knew two controvertible facts about the man: He was a thrill-seeking photographer, and he drove a Vespa.

That initial impression may speak more to the cultural resonance of the two-wheeled Italian icon than Neff’s personality as a whole, but “thrill-seeking photographer” and “Vespa” seemed to paint a pretty complete portrait of him at the time.

Turns out the first big purchase of Neff’s life occurred as a teenager in southern California when he plunked the cash he’d earned as a paperboy down on the counter at Sears in exchange for the Vespa the company sold under the Allstate brand.

“I just thought they were the coolest looking things,” Neff says. “I really admire motorcycles. I’m not a car guy.”

Now he owns four Vespa—which means “wasp” in Italian—two daily riders and two he is still tinkering with in his garage. The crown of his collection being a rare mint-green Primavera ET3 he imported himself from Japan. While on a photographic journey and sabbatical with his wife and daughter in the city of Chiba, Japan, Neff and some friends discovered the snow-blanketed ET3 that had been all but abandoned by its owner with only 2.4 KM on the odometer. Neff exhaustively tracked down the Vespa’s owner in Tokyo, came to a sale agreement with the help of an interpreter and now drives one of only a handful of Japanese imported Vespas in the country to and from the LSU photo lab.

The photographer proudly claims his rank as Member #348 of the Vespa Club of America and has become somewhat of a representative for the renowned motor scooter here in the U.S. Francesco Nepi, a marketing executive for Vespa parent company Piaggio, even invited Neff to the factory in Pontedera, Italy. Nepi wanted to hear his take on the U.S. scooter scene.

In Baton Rouge, the 57-year-old has taken local scooter culture from zero to 60 with the founding of The Vesparados, a group of 15 or so Vespa fanatics who meet monthly to talk shop and, of course, ride.

Neff runs errands on his Vespa; but when he wants some free open air, he cruises down River Road or up to the hilly climes of St. Francisville.

“It feels great with the wind on your face,” Neff says. “It’s exhilarating and relaxing at the same time.”

With its large potholes and pedestrian-defying grid of streets grinding the gears of any small-wheeled scooter, Baton Rouge seems like the last place a Vespa club would thrive, but Neff and the Vesperados enjoy upgrading and rebuilding Vespa as much as they enjoy riding them. Carlo Cuneo and Kevin Duffy are two Vesparados who owe much to Neff’s passion for scooters. Neff rolled up his sleeves to help his photographer pal Duffy rebuild a Vespa 125 from the ground up after it sat inoperative for 20 years. Duffy calls Neff the “leader of the pack” for Vespa aficionados in Baton Rouge.

When Cuneo bought his first Vespa in New Orleans, the salesman told him to call Neff if he had any questions. Though they weren’t acquainted at the time, Neff showed up at Cuneo’s house to help him uncrate the scooter and give it a thorough diagnostic.

“I refer to Tom as my scooter therapist, which is fun because I’m a therapist myself, and he doesn’t seem to mind so much,” says Cuneo. “I’ve asked him a thousand questions as I’ve moved from one model to another.”

When Vespa of New Orleans closed after Katrina, owners Gayle and Stephen Materne set up a dealership on Airline Highway in Baton Rouge. Now Vespa of New Orleans is up and running again, local scooter enthusiasts wonder if the days are numbered for the Baton Rouge dealership.

“I think downtown New Orleans and the French Quarter lend themselves to Vespa riding,” says Dana Hebert, the manager of Vespa of Baton Rouge. “Sales here have been slow, but it took about a year for sales in New Orleans to pick up. The owners are committed to giving Baton Rouge time to see if it works out.”

One explanation for slow local sales could be Vesparados like Neff, Cuneo and Duffy prefer revamping classic models rather than buying their modern counterparts off the showroom floor. Worldwide, Piaggio posted sales of $1.44 billion in 2004 and last year launched 15 new models.

While Vespa designs attract the more artistic-minded who prefer eccentric modes of transportation, the scooter’s prominent placement in films such as Roman Holiday, American Graffiti and The Talented Mr. Ripley seems to play into the same bygone longing for vintage culture that spawned a resurgence in VW Beetle sales in the late ‘90s and more recently, the American rollout of the Mini Cooper.

They are also relatively inexpensive. New Vespa models go for between $3,000 and $6,000.

Neff can push his ET3 to near 70 miles per hour and boasts he can make it from Baton Rouge to the Rock’n’Bowl in New Orleans on one small tank of gas. Despite that impeccable mileage, Neff is quick to dispel a common scooter myth, admitting the Vespa offers no solution for Baton Rouge’s biggest road hazard. “Since state law does not allow lane splitting, we get stuck in traffic too.”