Rome - Italian author Giorgio Bettinelli, who clocked up hundreds of thousands of kilometres travelling the globe on a Vespa scooter and then recounting his adventures in books, has died in China. He was 53.

Bettinelli who together with his wife had been living in southern China since 2004, died on Monday, a spokeswoman for his publisher, Milan-based Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore said Wednesday.

Bettinelli, whose latest book La Cina in Vespa (China on a Vespa) was published in earlier this year, was known to have been sick, but the spokeswoman said she had no further details.

Born in 1955 the northern Italian city of Crema, Bettinelli undertook a mammoth ride from Rome to Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam on his tiny Vespa - the subject of his first book in 
1997.

The Vespa, Italy's iconic scooter, became famous when Gregory Peck took his Hollywood co-star Audrey Hepburn on a memorable ride down the Italian capital's winding streets in the 1953 film Roman Holiday.

But Bettinelli, who also worked as a journalist, took his scooter beyond the chaos of Rome's traffic to parts of the world that faced different sorts of peril, including civil war.

In 2002 Feltrinelli published Brum Brum - 254,000 kilomtres on a Vespa, followed in 2005 by Rhapsody in Black - On a Vespa from Angola to Yemen.

"Giorgio... is still travelling, but in another world," his widow Yapei was quoted as saying by the ANSA news agency. (dpa)