Laverda is one of those ‘rabbit hole’ brands, as in: you can spend a lot of time wandering down internet rabbit holes when learning about it. You find some interesting things down there, though. Can you guess how this Italian motorcycle ties to flamboyant dancing in 1700s Spain?
We’ll start a little closer to the present, in Breganze, Italy, in 1949. That’s when Francesco Laverda built Moto Laverda off the back of his father’s agricultural machinery business. The bikes earned a decent reputation for reliability and were, of course (we’re talking about Italians here), a popular choice for racing.
In the early ’60s, Francesco’s son, Massimo, joined the team, helping usher Laverda into its relatively short golden age. This bike is from the tail end of that age, just two years before things really started to go wrong.
We all know that Honda’s CB750 rocked the motorcycling world. Laverda’s response was a 981cc air-cooled DOHC triple that, according to Cycle World, felt a bit rushed.
“It was obvious the company was attempting to take a shortcut to the full-liter displacement class,” the magazine observed in a look back at the Laverda brand. “The three-cylinder was clearly Laverda’s parallel twin plus one.”
Whatever the case, the Laverda 1000 was produced in some form or another from 1973 to 1988. The 3C was introduced in 1974, featuring better brakes than the year before. Two years later, Laverda introduced the legendary Jota, built around the same platform. Which is where the old-worldy dancing comes in. The jota is a dance from the 18th and 19th centuries that originates in the Aragon region of Spain. The music that accompanies it – which sounds a bit like mariachi without the trumpets or violins – is played in… wait for it… three-quarter (3/4) time.
See what they did there? Three cylinders, three-quarter time. Clever.
Francesco died the same year the Jota came out, triggering a nervous breakdown for Massimo. Things fell apart pretty quickly after that. By 1985 the Laverda family had walked away. In the early ’90s the brand was bought out, but the resulting bikes were shockingly poor. A friend of mine is an old-school moto-journalist in the UK and tells of attending a press launch where the company was only able to produce three bikes that actually ran. So, a group of about a dozen guys had to share. The number of functional bikes dropped to two when one of the bike’s brake calipers seized. In the end, Laverda asked the journalists to not write about the bike at all.
In 2000, the brand was swallowed up by Aprlia, and thereafter Piaggio in 2004. Piaggio has done nothing with the brand and has said that it would be happy to sell it to someone else.
This 1000 3C, though, is a time machine to better days. Maybe. The seller admits that it’s been a while since the bike was actually ridden – 17 years if I’m reading the ad correctly.
“On the day it was stored, it ran perfectly,” the seller promises. Hmm…
With 6,800 miles on the clock this Laverda 1000 3C is for sale for $10,000 in Gilroy, California here on eBay.