He just reads & scoots
Book Tour by Vespa
Montreal-born author now calls Italy home
Article by Cheryl Cornacchia - The Montreal Gazette - October 21, 2002

There doesn’t seem much that Montreal-born author Luigi Monteferrante has failed to to jam in his 40 years.

But this fall, the eccentric self-styled literary man has surpassed even his typically high level of ingenuity, creativity and chutzpah.

After stopping in Montreal to see family and to read from his just-published novel, At the Hearth of the Devil’s Lair, he took off for Toronto to pick up a Vespa.

He plans to go from city to city, reading to reading, on the famous Italian scooter first seen on the road in 1946. Montreal, Toronto, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., are just some of the scheduled stops on his Vespa-book-tour.

He borrowed the idea from the 1994 award-winning Italian film Caro Diario (Dear Diary). In that film, Italian film director Nanni Moretti embarks on a journey of self-discovery as he tours Italy on a Vespa.

“A Vespa is like a time machine,” said Monteferrante. “I shall be exploring my past and, perhaps more exciting, riding through the byways and routes I’ve never taken before.”

“The past is a place, a place like a maze; in one passage, what was; in another, what might have been.”

He first rode Vespas as a Canadian teenager spending summer holidays in the Italian village of Vasto Marina, where his parents were born and where he now lives, he says. When he knew he was coming back to Canada to tour with his book, he said, he thought, “Why not contact Vespa North America?”

The Toronto-based dealership gave him a 1986 PX125 E model, seeing the tour as a way to “test and prove the reliability of our vehicles on North American roads.” The two-seater, large-frame Italian motorcycle gets 130 kilometres on a three-litre tank of gas and does 85 km/h.

Moving forward, looking back.

“Riding it will take me back over 20 years,” said Monteferrante.

His Italian parents immigrated to Canada in the 1950s and he grew up in Lasalle. He attended Lasalle Catholic Comprehensive High School and studied Social Sciences at John Abbott College. In 1984, after one semester in the Classics & Philosophy Program at Concordia, he dropped out and headed to Italy “to write the Great Canadian Novel.”

“It took longer than I thought.”

He has taught English as a second language to pay the bills as he wrote.

He also runs Tomato, a small publishing house, and, with his wife Tiziana, has operated the Vasto Writers & Artists Retreat in his seaside home.

For the past few summers, as beach-loving Italians flocked to the Adriatic coast and his village, he has packed his bags for Ireland. He teaches creative writing at the Real English Summer School at University College Dublin.

“I think it’s my character traits that have forged my lifestyle,” he said. “I write, I write all day. I ride motorbikes, I ride hard. I read, I read for five days straight without ever getting out of bed. As a kid, I read Anna Karenina in two days.”

Writing his first novel, he said, required that same kind of stick-to-it spirit. In fact, he stopped teaching for a time and concentrated on writing and rewriting. When he was done, he said, he published the book himself because “there was no time to waste.”

Now, he said, it’s time to “hit the road. I want to breathe life from the wide expanses I shall be traveling across on my lovely little Vespa.”