HOBO WHO?

Strange word with stranger ethimology which embodies a founding myth of American culture. Hobo means love for adventure, wide open spaces, freedom of movement. The Hobos are fantastic characters born in the late ‘800 together with the railway invention, when the cheapest way to travel was to jump on freight trains. Vagabonds of all ages, youngsters, oldsters, childrens and families, always in search of luck and fortune. To travel and live America without paying the ticket.

This long adventurous journey through America, from ‘800 to ‘900, will rise a genuine culture: a way of life dictated by hard times, like the gold rush and the great depression. But full of poetry! In fact, the Hobo’in fascinated young and old people, artists and rebellious spirits, that become Hobo
not for the need but for the desire and the spirit of adventure. These included Jack London, the brilliant “tramp of the stars” that captures the myth of the wilderness, or Jack Kerouac, father of the Beat Genera on and endless mental wanderings.

“Hobo means love of adventure, wide open spaces, freedom of movement. It’s a way of life dictated by hard times like the gold rush and the great depression, but full of poetry! Starting from the early years of American XX century, nowadays the Hobo spirit is more alive than ever: we’ve found it in the soul of a traveller who rides his bike as the Hobo rode the freights. For the love of life, the open spaces and the world!”

Antonio Colombo
Cinelli President

“In this endless matrix of streets, cars, cell-phone towers, businesses, houses, jobs, and families, the train tracks are a trapdoor exit, a gap, an exception where silence and lawlessness still reign. If highways and roads are America’s veins, the hundreds of thousands of miles of tracks are like those chakra diagrams in acupuncturists’s offices, the hidden flows of energy that affect the body as a whole. It’s as if the vapor of several hundred years of America’s daring and rugged spirit is contained within the wafting, intoxicating smell of hot railroad tar. It is the last truly American place, untainted by the regrets of modern progress. Each ride is a roll of the dice, a unique and unpredictable experience. Perhaps that’s why we do it, to gamble, to relinquish control completely and give ourselves over to fate and luck.”
(Aaron Lake Smith – Vice Magazine/January 2013)