Gilera
A Hill-Climb in 1909
Start with a young man in a small Milan workshop, not yet thirty, who has just built a motorcycle to his own design and then gone out and won a hill-climbing race on it. That was Giuseppe Gilera in 1909, age 22, and the machine was called the VT 317. He hadn't come from nowhere — by most accounts he'd been apprenticing in the motorcycle trade since he was 14, starting around 1901 with Bianchi and later working with the Italian arm of the Swiss firm Moto Rève, including time at their factory in Geneva. But the company that would carry his name began right there, with that first bike and that first win. Gilera wasn't a general engineering firm that stumbled into motorcycles; it was built to make them from day one.
Within a decade the operation had outgrown Milan. By around 1920, Giuseppe Gilera had moved production to Arcore, a town just north of the city, and it was there that the marque would be built, raced, nearly extinguished, and rebuilt for the next eight decades.
The Early Machines
Giuseppe Gilera put together a small racing team as early as 1911 and set about proving the marque in regional competition, a pattern that would define the company for the next half-century: race first, sell second. When the First World War arrived, Gilera moved into 500cc production, and the sidevalve singles that followed — 350cc, 500cc, and 600cc — earned a reputation less for flash than for durability. They were simple, well-made, and hard to break, which in the rough roads and rougher races of the era counted for everything.
That reputation paid off after the war. Gilera's flathead 500s took top honors in international competition, and through the late 1920s and into the 1930s the bikes proved themselves in the brutal, multi-day grind of the International Six Days Trial, helping Italy to team victories in 1930 and 1931. Gilera returned to overhead-valve design in 1926, and by the mid-1930s the range included the Quattro Bulloni 500 and the Otto Bulloni — bikes that pointed toward the more sophisticated engineering the company would soon become known for.
The Golden Era: Fours, Superchargers, and the Saturno
The story that made Gilera's name in engineering circles starts earlier and somewhere else. In the early 1920s, two engineers, Carlo Gianini and Piero Remor, began experimenting with a transverse four-cylinder engine designed to solve the cooling problems that plagued inline configurations of the day. With backing from Count Bonmartini, they formed a company called GRB and built a 490cc four producing 28 horsepower at 6,000 rpm — remarkable output for the period. The design and the backing behind it eventually passed to C.N.A., the aviation-linked firm that held the rights to the engine, by then known as the Rondine. In 1936, Gilera bought the Rondine design from C.N.A. — sources differ on some of the finer details of the ownership chain before that point, but the 1936 acquisition and the racing program that followed are well documented.
What Gilera built from it was startling: a supercharged 500cc straight-four that looked like nothing else on the grid. In 1937 a Rondine-powered machine set a flying-kilometer speed record of 274.181 km/h, a figure that stood for close to twenty years. In 1939, rider Dorino Serafini took the European Championship title aboard the Rondine-derived four — at the time, the closest thing motorcycling had to a world championship.
On the road side, Gilera's most celebrated production model arrived the same year. The 1939 Saturno, a unit-construction single evolved from the earlier Otto Bulloni, combined performance with the kind of solid engineering the marque had built its name on; the design is usually credited to the same engineering team behind Gilera's other prewar models, though sources are not consistent about naming a single designer. War delayed its real production life, but from 1946 to 1958 Gilera built just over six thousand Saturnos, and the model has remained one of the most sought-after Italian classics from the era, prized as much for its handling as for its scarcity.
By the 1950s, Gilera was operating at the peak of its powers. Under engineer Piero Remor — the same man who had helped conceive the original four-cylinder layout decades earlier — the Gilera Four became the dominant force in 500cc grand prix racing, and the decade is remembered, without much argument from anyone who was there, as the company's finest hour.
Racing: Six Titles and a Gentleman's Retreat
The numbers from that era are the foundation of Gilera's reputation. Between 1950 and 1957, Gilera won six 500cc world championships and a matching run of manufacturer titles. Umberto Masetti took the rider's crown in 1950 and again in 1952. Geoff Duke, one of the great stylists of the era, won three straight titles for Gilera in 1953, 1954, and 1955. Libero Liberati closed out the run in 1957, taking both the rider's and manufacturer's championships in the same season.
It hadn't always gone Gilera's way — in 1949, the inaugural year of the 500cc world championship, British rider Les Graham beat Gilera's Nello Pagani to the title by a single point, with Pagani taking wins at Assen and Monza and Arciso Artesiani rounding out the podium in third for the marque. But the years that followed belonged to Arcore.
Then, at the height of its success, Gilera walked away. In 1957, facing thin motorcycle sales in the postwar Italian market, Gilera joined Moto Guzzi and Mondial in what's generally described as a gentleman's agreement to withdraw from grand prix racing as a cost-cutting measure. It was a startling retreat for a team that had just won everything, and it closed the book on Gilera's factory racing program for over four decades.
The return, when it came, was worth the wait. In 2001, under Piaggio ownership, Gilera came back to grand prix racing in the 125cc class. On 20 May 2001 at Le Mans, a young rider from San Marino named Manuel Poggiali won the French Grand Prix for Gilera — the marque's first grand prix victory since Liberati's championship season 44 years earlier. Poggiali went on to take the 125cc world title that year. Gilera's racing story got one more chapter in 2008, when Marco Simoncelli won the 250cc world championship for the team, clinching it at the final round in Valencia. Gilera left grand prix racing again in 2009, having delivered Italy's last world champion in the 250cc class.
Landmark Models Beyond the Racetrack
Away from the podium, Gilera built a long line of machines that shaped its identity with everyday riders. The Giubileo, launched in 1959 to mark the company's fiftieth anniversary, came in a range of displacements from 98cc up through 202cc and became one of the more familiar Gilera names on Italian roads. Decades later, the Saturno name was revived for a sport bike built from 1988 to 1991, a nod to the marque's prewar heritage rather than a direct successor. The early 1990s brought the Nordwest, a 558cc sport machine with supermoto leanings that showed Gilera still had appetite for something a little different.
But the model that did the most to keep the badge in showrooms was the Runner, a scooter built under Piaggio's ownership from 1997 until 2020, which became one of Europe's more recognizable sport scooters of its generation. Alongside it came the DNA, a scooter that borrowed styling cues and riding position from motorcycles in a way that felt, at the time, like a genuine attempt to blur the line between the two categories.
Ownership: Independence, Piaggio, and a Long Wind-Down
Gilera remained in the hands of its founder and then his family from 1909 until 1969, when Piaggio — already established as one of Italy's dominant two-wheel manufacturers through the Vespa — acquired the company. Under Piaggio, Gilera's focus shifted toward smaller-displacement machines and, for a time, off-road and motocross models, work that lacked the glamour of the racing years but kept the factory running through the 1970s and 1980s.
The Arcore factory itself, the site Giuseppe Gilera had chosen nearly a century earlier, closed in 1993, ending an 84-year run at that location. Production moved to Piaggio's plant in Pontedera, and the emphasis shifted decisively toward sport scooters, a category where the Gilera name still carried weight with Italian buyers.
That arrangement held for roughly another quarter-century. Several sources put the end of Gilera-branded production at 2020, with the Runner and other models dropped from the catalogue, though it's not always clear whether that date marks the end of the brand across Europe specifically or of Gilera manufacturing more broadly. Piaggio itself changed hands during this period too, though the record here is thin: reporting from 2019 pointed to Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Company building a stake in Piaggio, but the specific figures sometimes cited for an offer price, a total valuation, or the exact percentage Mubadala came to hold are not reliably confirmed and are left out here. What's clear is that Gilera today sits, at least on paper, as one small piece of a much larger Piaggio Group portfolio that also includes Vespa and Aprilia.
The Marque Today
In Europe, Gilera has been dormant since around 2020 — no new models, but no formal announcement of closure either, and Piaggio has kept the archives and the name alive rather than letting it lapse. Aprilia has absorbed much of the small-displacement motorcycle territory Gilera once occupied, leaving the older brand without an obvious lane to return to.
The more interesting story is happening elsewhere. In Argentina, a long-running licensee, Gilera Motors Argentina, has kept building and selling motorcycles under the name entirely independent of what's happening in Italy. The Smash 110 has been a genuine sales success there, reportedly the top-selling motorcycle in the country in 2025 — proof that the Gilera name still moves product, just not in the market where it was born.
There's also talk, based on design filings rather than any official statement, of a possible revival through a joint venture between Piaggio and its Chinese manufacturing partner Zongshen. Nothing has been confirmed. But for a marque that has already been buried once, in 1957, and come back to win a world championship at Le Mans in 2001, betting against a second act seems premature. Gilera's history is, if nothing else, a record of a company that keeps finding its way back onto the grid.