Words fail me ......

Restaurant chains can buy prints of royalty free vintage photographs for almost nothing. The frame cost more than the print.

Olive Garden is not in the business of bothering to stage scenes. And unless you're making a movie, there's not much of a business justification for doing so. It could get expensive really fast turning a set into a vintage look, photoshopping out the cell phone towers and hearing aids, procuring pristine vintage bikes and clothing, etc.

That picture is probably real.

Maybe they ride their beater all week and take the shiny one out on weekends to show off to their friends.

If this was a recently staged photo, the guy on the right wouldn't have a lit cigarette in his hand.

As a person who lived in Copenhagen where the bike lived on a square similar to that piazza, that looks about right for a daily used outdoor living bicycle.

This is the square, that's a bike shop on the corner (had a free air line outside!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%...torv_19-21.jpg

Bike look about the same in both photos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%...rv_facades.jpg

That's actually my flat with the windows open in the red building.

So, I don't see what you're on about with the bikes in the first photo!

Considering the plastic bag, it cannot be that old.

The real question is why the OP went to Olive Garden.

Olive Garden is the new cyclists hang out?

That's hilarious! Go figure-- older men who hang out in front of a bike shop have nicer than average bikes?

Still shocked that op didn't notice the plastic grocery bag before starting this silliness.

This thread is now about the ethics of sepia-toned 21st century photo prints hanging in chain restaurants. Society should come to a halt until we work this vital issue out.

Couldn't have been staged in California, we outlawed plastic bags here a couple years ago.

My older sister recently underwent cataract surgery, one eye at a time. After the first eye began to heal and she regained vision, she was struck by the to-be-fixed eye's color response and how everything appeared "sepia toned" (her words) from it. Weird, and a propos to the thread...

I think it could be an FBI surveillance photo. These men are planning to whack the head waiter over at Chili's, their main competitor.

Plastic bags have been around since the 60s in Europe. It was a Swedish company that brought them to the US in the early 80s (Celloplast).

Olive Garden is ****, I'd rather eat my fingers (or nothing to be honest.)

Those bikes are stone average.

I have also been round since the 60s and I don't consider myself that old either.

I think the bikes are real but the people are fake. They look like mannequins or space robots or something.

I guess it's the sepia-toned effect that lends an air of fakery. This photo was definitely not taken with a wet-plate view camera. But so what?

I was playing along with the OP, who was questioning the seemingly pristine condition of the bikes, but yeah all the more reason this is a silly thread.

Is food snobbery now a requirement for admission to the BF Real True Serious Cyclist Club?

I think we should actually make a fun game out of this absurd thread and figure out about when the picture was taken. I'm not knowledgeable about Italian street bikes like those pictured, but the clothes look like the 1980s to me, especially the cut of the suit and the style of the windbreaker. Also, the lights appear to be battery-powered incandescents, which I think would fit the era's technology.

Is the IG shifting a clue? In the U.S., any later than about 1983 or so, and I think the odds of 3 IG bikes meeting by chance would be almost nil, I don't know if they stayed common in Italy.

Also, the rear rack looks like 1980s or later to me--any earlier and I wouldn't expect to see black ones. Am I wrong about this?

Photo processing snobbery too:

Crappy food is crappy food. Nothing snobbish about that. Olive Garden serves FSOs, not food.

On BF not only do we have "In the eye of the beholder" as to how great a bike looks so now we have "In the taste bud's of the beholder" for the culinary experts.

But they have bells. Maybe they even wave when they pass people on the PMU.

Italian mafia about to whack somebody. The thick glasses banker in the suit is just making sure they get the right dude.