#GTS300SuperABS

Three-hundred cubic centimeters or so is a very good size for a scooter; fast enough to get you anywhere while keeping you out of trouble, small enough to fit into tight spaces and ensure you keep a real motorcycle in the stable as well so as not to have your man (or woman!) card revoked. Vespa’s been building the GTS 300 since 2009. For 2015, it was brought to the next level with ABS and traction control – both of which are more useful than you might imagine on a thing that’s built to run the urban maze’s various congealing, damp and greasy surfaces on 12-inch wheels. And while they were upgrading, they gave the Vespa a new multimedia platform to connect a smartphone to the bike so you can track torque output, lean angle, and where you left the GTS parked. The seat was restyled, new instruments now use wheel-speed sensors instead of a cable. Many styling details have been updated, and a new, more powerful ECU runs everything.

It really is a fine line between open-minded and cheap, between hip and hopeless, betwixt trending and tanking … and if you ride a scooter, you ride the razor’s edge, my friend. Obviously one has to be secure in one’s man or womanhood to even begin; my male college kid won’t be seen in the same garage with any scooter for fear it will dilute his musk. At the cool end of the scale, there’s our photographer/filmmaker/ballet dancer friend Richard Wright, who also finds time to head up the Bevery Hills Scooter Club and tear up Latigo Canyon on his bored-out Aprilia 250. At the other end, well, there’s yours truly on the Kymco Downtown 300i. How’s that for segue?

The queen of Vespas has received the latest in high-tech rider aids, with both ABS and traction control. The single-cylinder four-stroke buzzes underneath me as I’m sitting on a comfortable seat while smelling spring air in Tuscany, and I notice the butterflies in the fields covered in yellow spring flowers. It’s good to be liberated by the warming sun.