1. Name, Age, Occupation?Jacopo, 33, founder and director of
DODICI CICLI.
2. Were do you live?I live in Milano, but my home town is Vicenza
3. What are you riding these days?I am riding one of my frames, the top level which is called Super, made of columbus stainless steel, campagnolo record c crank and bottom bracket, vintage campy pedals and steel headset, toshy keirin double straps ,dodici rough finish 405 rims laced to phil wood hubs, with phil wood cog and rolls san marco saddle, vintage cinelli pista handle bar and road cinelli vintage stem.
4. Tell everyone about Dodici. Dodici started as a little blog to document the fun of making bicycle for friends and researching old vintage items and stories to make brand new bikes and ride around in milano, while doing this we created a blog called vintagepista.com , that was the start of it all, many people wanted to have bikes like ours or were searching for rare old items.
We found out the need for good quality and soon started to produce rims, while doing custom frames just for friends through the best frame builders available in italy, briefly after that we defined some models for our frames : Veloce, Leggero, Super and Gara. We searched for various framebuilders, most of them were very old and with generations of experiences on their backs, we found the ones that were able to hear our need and be flexible to the needs of today fixed gear road riders, we are very proud and happy about it. We also found out a way to always give each customers a frame made just for himself in a limited amount of time, the frames are produced in 6 sizes that usually fit most of the riders and are stored at our painter, we just neet to tell him :model, size and color and the frame is ready in a week time.
Right now we are working worldwide shipping rims and frames worldwide, receiving great feedbacks, supporting many realities like alleycats, MASH SF , Apologies Accepted polo team (Paris), Pipe Gang (road and polo team from milano) and developing various collaborations with the most interesting design projects that came to our headquarter.
5. You recently opened doors to a new store. Tell us how that is going?The shop is a dream coming true, sometimes i heard people saying that you are never too old for a nice childhood, and this is pretty much how it seems, lot of work, building bicycles all day every day, beautiful bikes, lots of friend coming by, lots of funny things to do. People working at dodici are all friends and we pretty much share a similar view on things. It is incredible to build bikes for people, everyone is so happy with the things we give them and the joy they give us as a feed back for having their "freedom tool" has no price. We are also very lucky because milano is very open to new trends and ideas so lot of people is coming to the shop to have complete bikes with our unique frames.
6. Were is your favorite place to ride?I love riding in Milano at night and in the country around Milano during foggy winter mornings.
7. On a Friday night. What can kind of beverage can we see in Jacopo's hand?Friday? WE LIKE TO PARTY!
We go out very often, and i am pretty active in the Milano night scene, one of the favourite hungouts for the fixed riders here in Milano, a place where the pipe gang (the Dodici firearm) are often spotted is the BRUTTO POSSE, in the Navigli zone on Thursday nights, I drink beer and sometimes straight whiskey!
8. Dodici has been making some really nice wheelsets and frames for awhile now. What else can we expect to see in the future from Dodici?We are an exploding fall of ideas, we found out that italy has a lot of opportunities for people with good ideas, there are a lot of small places where you can start the most crazy project, our Italian made hub will definitely be one of the hottest thing, we just released the new polo club frame and a very radical TRICK frame will be ready in the near future with a custom tubeset developed by Columbus, we will have some clothing too very soon!
9. How is riding in Milan? What are some of the pros and cons of your Italian city?Milano is very flat which is positive for the fixie enthusiasts, also is not too big and you can move around very fast on pretty much all the city, the cons are that there are a lot of stones on the pavement, like on the paris-roubaix, and there are a lot of tram-rails, rails at the hight of the ground used for urban transportation, the brother of Fausto Coppi, Serse Coppi died after hitting his head on the ground for a incident caused by these fucking things, so beware, out of town riders often find these things hard to avoid..
10. Is there anything else that you would like to add? Maybe when your coming to Florida to ride through some heat?woow!
I wanna come to Florida so bad! Anybody has some place for me to stay??