ON THE ROAD

The motorcycle of the “New ERA” is ‘NERA’, the first functional prototype of a completely customizable electric bike printed in 3D by Marco Mattia Cristofori. The project involved designing NERA from the ground up, with every aspect of traditional motorcycle engineering and production being rethought. 28-year-old Cristofori moved from Ascoli Piceno (a town in the Marche region) to Rome to study architecture, then to London, Istanbul and New York, before arriving in Berlin to be with his partner. As he explained to an Italian magazine: “Berlin’s air changes you. Here everyone can do everything. It does not matter where you come from, what color you are, how you dress, what you have studied. Be yourself and do what you like.” In Berlin, there are hundreds of creative startups looking for creative people and he started to work for Bigrep, a company that produces large scale 3D printers. They were looking for a designer able to prove the great potential of their printers, and they definitely found him. Working on large-scale projects allowed him to think and design pieces that others did not think of before. Like tires or even a motorcycle. “I saw that several big companies are betting on airless tires. For any type of vehicle. But nobody had tried to print a functional one in 3D for a bicycle. Perhaps due to lack of equipment. I researched a lot, I modeled and printed several small tests to be able to have the same behavior as a normal bicycle tire. Then I succeeded.” And probably while pedaling on his colleague’s bike on which he had mounted the airless tires, that he envisioned NERA for the first time. When asked about his relationship with Italy, Cristofori replied: “I am madly in love with my city I brought friends from all over the world to visit it, and everyone is dazzled by it. My family still lives there. Ascoli is a city of talent.”