The Skinny
- Size – 40mm x 10.2mm
- Movement – Panerai In-House P.900 (now with hacking), hours, mins, secs, date, autowinding
- Water resistance – 50m
- Strap – matte black gator (pictured with custom strap by Otis Blank)
- Price – $6100
Totally Missed This One When It Came Out
How is it that I missed the Panerai Radiomir Quaranta when it came out in 2023? Not only do I love Panerai, but I’m a watch journalist, dammit, so I should know these things. In asking other people who also should have known about this release, I was struck by how many seemed to have also missed it. My guess: In 2023 people were blinded by industry-wide opulence and psychedelic Rolexes, and these smallish Panerai were simply too understated to notice.
Understated. That is exactly why these 40mm Radiomir models are so unquestionably classy. It’s why I bought one. And I wasn’t going to buy a watch at all, but then I found myself in Milan killing time and wandered into the world’s largest PAM boutique and walked out with a black-dialed Radiomir Quaranta. Amazing boutique experience, BTW. You should go.
Despite this being a hands-on review (I own the thing, so, yeah), I won’t bore you, dear reader, with all the little details about design and so on that we watch critics like to wax on about endlessly to no one’s benefit. Nor will I spend a lot of time contextualizing this watch, or explaining that it’s finally in a size we normally sized homo-sapiens can wear. What I want to do is, instead, talk about how I use this watch, to try to explain what it’s good for.
It’s a Dress Watch
It’s a dress watch, full stop. Yes, mine is rated to 50m of water resistance (previous versions were marked at 30m, much to the chagrin of forum-dwellers who like to bitch about nothing remotely important), but it has, and will always have, a leather strap, so it’s not for swimming or showering or anything wet. It’s just 10mm tall, elegantly appointed, and the ever-present leather strap goes great with dressy attire. Again, this is a dress watch. Even the lovely sales-dude in Milan said so.
But I use dress watches the way most people use G-Shocks: I wear them all the time, even when mowing the lawn or riding my bike or whatever I get up to in my decidedly rural and casual life. I wear this watch with khakis in need of a wash and an old military-issue wool shirt. I wear it with deck shoes and a polo shirt (and the same shitty khakis). And I wear it with a black velvet jacket (yes, silk…people want to know, it turns out) paired with Gucci loafers to gala events at the goddamned Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, thank you very much. This watch does so much.
For everything else I do where greater durability, more sporty vibes or water resistance is needed, I bought a white-dialed 42mm Panerai Submersible Luna Rossa. Turns out these two watches make a near-perfect two-watch collection (which I aspire to).
What the Radiomir Quaranta does so well for me it may not do for others, and that’s why the world has a gazillion watch styles on offer. However, if you’re even remotely curious about Panerai, or even a full-blown Paneristi, then you’d be missing out if you haven’t tried this thing on. What astounds me is how elegant the watch is while retaining every quality of Panerai that makes the brand’s watches so exceptionally unique.
What’s unique? Sandwich dial, bizarre cushion case with wire lugs (find me another like it even remotely as lovely and “wearable” as the kids say), impeccable polishing throughout, precision at right around +/-0 seconds per day (with like zero positional variance), auto-winding, and so on. There’s obviously a date and sub-seconds, which I used to think robbed one of that gorgeous art-deco Panerai 3, but now I find these features downright useful, especially because I never remember the date and seem to need to know it all the time for some reason. To people who decry a date complication on a Panerai, I say go walk your dog or whatever calms you down.
But I wasn’t going to go into all those design particulars. Let’s face it, you’re here for the pictures, which do that work better than words.
Watches Are About (Italian) Identity
What I really use the Radiomir Quaranta for is to bask in my being a descendant of Italians. I just love Italian stuff. Yeah, it’s all so beautiful, and that’s obviously important to me, but Italian stuff also just makes me feel more like myself, somehow. Probably has something to do with my father getting over his immigrant-kid ethnic shame in middle age and indulging Italian everything in the post-war, post-fascism glory days when I was growing up. By 1970, Italy was just killing it, and we indulged. My grandmother apparently charged into a fascist parade in Naples in 1939 and grabbed my father from the marching throng of black-shirted kids (he wore one my great aunt sewed up for the occasion). Grandma Famelo found herself in jail yelling at the gestapo. Never met her; wish I had; great story. But it adds up, being super into Italian stuff after the war, because the Italians made amazing stuff, and also: fuck Musollini.
Ok, maybe Panerai’s divers were originally funded by the fascists, fine, but what wasn’t at the time? Fiats, check, Ducatis, check. Ferragamos, check. Gucci, check. I don’t wear the Panerai to celebrate anything fascist, but rather everything post- and anti-fascist (and I don’t mean it like that, so eff off). David Bowie made the Nazi leather trench coats and blonde Hitler buzz cuts into a punk fashion statement that became gay-adjacent androgyny by the time New Order hit the stage in 1981, so whatever. Sly made Panerai dope for macho dudes in the ’90s. Ok! By 1965 or thereabouts postmodernism had basically disassociated everything from everything – not that a German Shepherd wouldn’t freak out a victim of the Nazis, please, I get that much – but what a Paernai can mean to someone like me in 2025 is pretty damn wide open, postmodernly speaking.
Also, Rolex built the first Panerai dive watches, so add that to the confusion. Huh? I thought Hans Wilsdorf was pro-Allies and….whatever, the dude needed contracts to fund development of the Datejust.
All this to say that watches are about playing with and expressing one’s identity, and while a Rolex is a fine watch – and arguably a better value from a CHF-per-tech-on-offer perspective – wearing a Rolex has never felt right to me. That’s a class of people – countless millions of them – that I just don’t feel like I’m a member of. I don’t feel above or below the Rolex-set, just a ways off to the side of it. I’m the Italian kid whose parents raised him almost right, the one who wants to kind of maximize and not minimize that ethnic difference, because why not? Finally, after decades of damning n-word-level discrimination here in the USA, being Italian is mostly cool as hell. I can hold my Italian-American head up on behalf of my grandparents who did not enjoy that ethnic status. And a Panerai – even if it is a Swiss timepiece – just nails the vibe, and no other watch you can go out and buy will do that as well.