Maria ploughed the family finances into “Officina Meccanica Benelli”, and with an eye to the future sent two sons – Giuseppe and Giovanni – off to Switzerland to study engineering while three of the sons together with six employees established the factory in Pesaro. That left one son Antonino (Tonino) who was too young to go “on the tools” but in due course he would assume his place in the history of Benelli by taking to the racetrack.
The Benelli factory at first busied itself with repairing and fabricating difficult to obtain spares for cars, guns, and motorcycles and while success followed, by 1918 the possibility of making their own motorcycle arose and was answered in 1919 with a 75cc two-stroke single cylinder engine for attaching to a bicycle. Benelli upped…
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Old Bike Australasia (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 118