Originally Posted by
funbuffalo24
I won't even look at new Bianchi Vigorelli's, for example because even they are mass produced on some heartless albeit high quality welding line in Taiwan, so to me it's like they've lost their soul a little bit even though the ride and build quality is still there. (Some)Italians however are still making beautiful steel frames in house that aren't 6 of the same Chinese bike coming off the same production line but with different paint jobs or cable routing; just look at the Cinelli XCR, or the Tommasini Techno(drool) or Sintesi(drool) as examples.
For me, Bianchi lost some luster when Sky Yeager left. Models like the Volpe, Pista and even the 90s Milano helped make one of the oldest bike companies on the planet seem improbably cool. IDK if they still have them, but I remember thinking how cool their line of steel "do-anything" bikes (we'd call them "gravel bikes" now) were in the mid-00s.
My first serious bike (not the Bridgestone 300 that was at least 5cm too tall for me) was an Eros I got specifically because I thought that a big company still making "serious" road bikes out of steel was really cool- I don't know if it seemed weirder in 2008 or so than it did now.
e) For another shot at this, a lot of countries have stereotypes, fair or not, attached to their engineering. Germans like everything precise and balanced, Japanese like improving the obvious imperfections that the arrogant Europeans refuse to admit, French like doing whatever the hell they want no matter how weird it is. Italian stuff always reminded me of the old saying for sports cars that fast should be beautiful- i.e. that aesthetics and function aren't separate, but are in fact two sides of the same coin, and that the world's best bicycle or car should also be the world's most beautiful one. Of course a lot of this is fictitious, but there's still an element of truth to different cultures bringing different philosophies to engineering to the table.
I think this quote, ironically not from an Italian framebuilder (but one very much inspired by them) sums that up-
'The bicycle is sort of a picture," he says of what he, learned; 'it is artistic. Each bike has a basic function and specification. In addition to that, though, the bike has to be well-balanced and beautiful, both by itself and when the rider is on it. I build every bicycle as if everybody sees it and appreciates its beauty. I don't build in a mechanical way, because even if a bike is 100-percent mechanically correct, if it looks ugly when the rider is on it, then it is not successful. - Yoshiaki Nagasawa