In 2004, you could buy a used Aprilia RSV Mille for the same money as a clapped-out CBR 929 that had been down twice. The Ducati guys thought you were confused. The Honda guys thought you were insane. The dealer thought you were the only smart person who had walked in all month.
He was right.
The RSV Mille was everything the market did not want. It was Italian, which meant parts were expensive and the dealer network was thin. It was a V-twin in a world that had decided four-cylinders were the only serious answer. It had a weird chassis, a weird exhaust note, and a riding position that took about two hundred miles to make sense. Every magazine review had a paragraph about how it was not quite as fast as the R1 around a racetrack.
Nobody asked the obvious question: compared to what? Compared to the Japanese inline fours that everyone already had? Sure. But compared to anything else you could actually afford and actually ride on the street without ending up in a guardrail? The Mille was extraordinary.
The V60 motor had a sound that made people stop in parking lots. Not the way a straight pipe Harley makes people stop — that is just noise. This was mechanical music. Pull the throttle at four thousand RPM in second gear and there was a sound coming out of that airbox that I have never heard from any other motorcycle before or since. Deep, complex, like the engine was working something out.
The problem with Italian bikes in that era was not the bikes. It was the infrastructure around them. Parts took two weeks. Dealers were scattered. The forums were full of guys who treated ownership like a personality disorder. You either loved it completely or you sold it in frustration after the first dealer bill.
I stayed. The dealer bills were real but so was everything else.
Here is what I figured out eventually: the bikes the market does not understand are the ones worth owning. Not because suffering builds character. Because the market is usually wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with the machine itself. It is wrong because of parts availability, because of dealer networks, because of magazine lap times, because of what the guy at work thinks is cool.
None of that has anything to do with whether a bike is great.
That RSV Mille is worth three times what I paid for it. The ones that actually ran right and were taken care of are legitimately rare now. The market figured it out about fifteen years too late, which is exactly how this always goes.
The bikes nobody was buying in 2004 are the interesting ones in 2026. Write that down.