Pegoretti Mxxxxxo
On a spring evening in 2008, the late, great actor Robin Williams visited the North American Handmade Bicycle Show in Portland, Oregon, where he made the acquaintance of Italian framebuilder Dario Pegoretti. The two went to dinner, spoke about bikes, and Williams ordered himself a Pegoretti frame that became one of his most prized.
Pegoretti had been creating frames for the stars long before that meeting, only it was the stars of the cycling world that he was more used to working with. In the days of a steel and aluminium peloton, Pegoretti was the apprentice to world famous framebuilder Luigino Milani, who was a favoured contract builder for many of the pro teams. After his apprenticeship Pegoretti continued to build for the pros, with Indurain, Pantani and Cipollini all having ridden his frames. But if this conjures an image in your mind of a dusty old master, bound by traditions and filled with nostalgia for the golden age of cycling, it’s very much at odds with the man himself.
‘It was really just a job, just a question of money,’ Pegoretti says. ‘That is my past and I prefer to look at the future.’ That futuristic side of Pegoretti’s design is best shown in his famed, often psychedelic custom paint jobs. As much as his skill with a welding torch appeals to customers, it’s Pegoretti’s artistic, bohemian character that distinguishes him from his peers.
With the Mxxxxxo frame, Pegoretti’s ability to meld the traditional steel past of the bicycle with the aesthetics and high performance of modern frames couldn’t be more evident. (When we asked Pegoretti why he called the frame the Mxxxxxo, he replied with typical insouciance, ‘I don’t know.’)
A steely expression
In Pegoretti’s view, steel is not the material of the past, but rather a fully capable material neglected in recent years. A glance at the Mxxxxxo supports this. It weighs a touch over 1.6kg, which is more than respectable for
Dario Pegoretti made his name building frames for pro legends of the past, but his bikes couldn’t be more forward looking