Why Italy is overflowing with amazing vintage watches

Allen Farmelo

Rome: In 1997, I waltzed into a vintage watch shop in Milan and thought I’d died and gone to horological heaven. In 2002, I was strolling along the Ponte Vecchio in Florence and my jaw went slack as I gawked at the amazing vintage watches for sale on that famous bridge. Venice mid-aughts, same. Rome and Florence just last year, and the vintage watches just keep coming.

For decades, Northern Italy’s major cities have been positively overflowing with vintage watches. As pre-owned watches age into neo-vintage status (20 to 40 years old), which in turn are becoming vintage watches (over 40 years old), there appears to be an endless supply of collectible timepieces in the top half of the Boot.

Italy’s horological riches are no secret to serious collectors around the world. In fact, some of the world’s most renown watch collectors—people like Guido Mondani, Sandro Fratini, and Auro Montanari (a.k.a. John Goldberger)—are Italian. Italy’s vintage watch riches are also no secret to ambitious dealers of vintage watches, who go on regular buying trips there, hitting up estate sales and off-beat auctions to replenish their stock.

The Ponto Vecchio in Florence used to be a mainstay for vintage watches, but modern single-brand boutiques are slowly pushing the vintage-focused shops into other neighborhoods.

The question I’ve long pondered is why is Italy so full of amazing vintage watches? How did this happen?

I’ve come across various flimsy theories. One I’ve heard a few times is so lazy and circular that it cracks me up: Italians are just so stylish! (Yes, that’s the whole theory.) Some more journalistic theories exist, however. One suggests that in the 1980s an emerging cadre of Italian watch collectors went on a buying spree in the U.S.—this neither verifiable nor able to explain the plethora of Italian-market-only vintage timepieces that Italian collectors have amassed. Another theory suggests that a single magazine cover showing Paul Newman wearing a Rolex Daytona triggered wide-spread horological mania among affluent, middle-aged Italian men.

These are the kinds of answers you get when you narrow your sample population to people like Fratini and Montanari/Goldberger, who were admittedly way ahead of the watch-collecting curve, but certainly can’t be responsible for what is clearly a socio-economic phenomenon pouring into the display cases of Italy’s vintage watch shops.

A typical shop window in Milan is full of vintage pieces, this one being Orologi Milan.

I’ve long assumed that a legitimate explanation for Italy’s vintage watch saturation would require serious socio-cultural investigation, the kind that will never be conducted (let alone funded) for such a superfluous topic. No one really needs to know why Italy has long held such a stockpile of great vintage watches, but it has long been a slightly nagging curiosity.

Then, last week, the Milan-born watch dealer and collector Gai Gohari, who has amassed an insane collection of vintage Piaget by shopping in Italy, may have cracked the code. The simplest explanation often being the best, his statement sounded plausible. “Italians always save that money to buy that special watch for the special occasion . . . [and] . . . all those watches remain within the families. And now there’s a lot of stuff to be picked up from the estates,” he told Robb Report. Despite no formal study to back it up, Gohari’s explanation does align with the history of the Italian economy and the dolce vita culture of the post-World War II era.

It’s well established that Italy (especially the northern cities) experienced a golden era of design, fashion, art, film, music, theater, and literature after the war. Between 1950 and 1963, Italy’s gross domestic product remarkably grew by an average of 5.9 percent year over year. Across the country, families sent children to college for the first time and bought their first homes, mod-cons, and automobiles. Epitomizing the moment, Gucci finally ceased production of army boots and offered its now-iconic horse-bit loafers in 1953. An affluent, young middle class that loved to dress to the nines emerged from the dark years of fascism, and the number of watches from the post-war era in the vintage shops now tells us they also loved their wrist candy.

As for brands, Italians appear to have bought a lot of Vacheron Constantin dress watches during the 1950s and ‘60s. This is impossible to confirm outside of investigating the brand’s wholesale logs from that time, but, anecdotally, I’ve never seen so many Vacheron Constantins in one place. One theory says that Vacheron Constantin has been exporting to Italy royalty going back to the 1700s. As with so much of this story, we are left to speculate, and I’d go with something far more mundane: perhaps Vacheron’s Italian sales rep at the time was especially talented.

Patek Philippe is also well represented, as are Rolex and Omega, of course, but collectors should note that there are more dress watches than sports watches, generally, when shopping for post-war timepieces in Italy. For those of us into those smaller styles, it’s a treat.

Italy may not be a hotbed of Rolex Submariners and GMTs, but it is a great place to find rare models.

During the 1980s, Italy was going through another economic boom, culminating in il soprasso, the moment in 1987 when the country’s GDP overtook Great Britain’s. By 1989, Italy was the sixth-largest economy in the world—a very long way to come from the rubble and ruins of World War II. And so its citizens embraced an even higher level of luxury goods in the 1980s, as is evidenced by the number of 1980s Rolexes available, and especially solid-gold and two-tone Day-Dates. This was the decade when Gianni Agnelli, head of Fiat, was rocking his watches over his shirt cuffs. Bling was the thing to crown a corporate king, and so on with the unabashed opulence of that decade.

It is at the 1980s that we currently come up against the temporal boundary of vintage watches: the meaningful 40-year mark. These newly vintage watches are broadly rising in value (despite downturns in the watch market more generally). As for what the Italian neo-vintage market will reveal of the 1990s, it is still the early days. We now know better than to speculate, or we’ll end up saddled with our own strange and unsubstantiated theory. Whatever happens in the coming years, Italy is as much a must-see for serious watch collectors as it was when I first tripped into that shop in Milan over 25 years ago. If you’ve not been, you really have to go!