Years ago I pitched a story to the world’s largest watch publication, Hodinkee, about Panerai, Ducati and Italian style. Alas, it was a half-baked pitch, and I didn’t get the gig.
Digging through my old emails, I found the pitch, which included this stinker of a sentence: “The quest to identify some ineffable essential Italianness that infuses these products likely fails because there is no such actual thing.”
As it turns out, a story about Italian style claiming that Italian style doesn’t exist wasn’t what Hodinkee’s editors were looking for.
From the same pitch comes another stinker: “Fascism had a lot to do with Italy’s industrial ineptitude.”
That didn’t help my case, either.
However, reading over that pitch today, I think these are salient points when considering what might constitute Italian character, or Italianness, or whatever it is that we are trying to point to when we talk about Italian style.
Italian Style After World War II
Note that as the Western world began to industrialize, Italy wasn’t even a nation. Unification happened – quite tenuously – in 1861. Most of Italy remained largely agricultural, then the South fell into horrible drought (hence my grandfather’s departure to America), inflation soared, then World War I tore through the young nation with unimaginable ferocity, then Il Duce came along and lied about everything (including the trains running on time), and then – finally – after World War II, Italy unleashed its pent-up energy and became what many still consider to be the world’s most sensuous, imaginative and downright cool industrialized nation – one with a style that the world would come to admire and imitate.
As JFK said of Italy in 1963, “the growth of the nation’s economy, industry, and living standards in the postwar years has truly been phenomenal.” Between 1950 and 1963, Italy’s GDP grew by an average of 5.9 percent year over year. After WWII, Italy was just killing it.
Ducati (and, to be fair, Moto Guzzi and MV Agusta) really hit their stride once the notoriously austere Il Duce was no longer trying to control Italian industry. Parnerai, however, got its big moment from the fascist regime.
Since 1860, Panerai was a respected watch shop in Florence. In the 1930s, the fascists tasked Panerai with making dive watches and compasses for the Italian Navy’s frogmen, who rode on torpedoes underwater, sunk enemy ships, and then, presumably, either died in the blast or drifted out to sea alone at night. Italy’s frogmen were submerged Kamikazes.
If your loved ones ever tell you riding motorcycles is crazy dangerous, just describe Italy’s frogmen straddling a torpedo, kiss your loved one on the cheek, and say “See you for dinner, babe.”
Italian Fearlessness and Speed
Anyone who has ever raced any vehicle in Italy understands that Italians go very very fast and they do it very very well. Valentino Rossi, Marco Pantani, Nino Farina – I could fill the page with such names.
I once rode around Mugello in a Ferrari Superfast with a professional Italian racer at the wheel, and I barely registered the experience because my brain stopped functioning under the multidirectional g-forces. When I raced bicycles in Italy in the 1990s, I found myself among young men leaned over in corners at 35mph, elbow-to-elbow, chatting about what they’d like to eat for lunch (trout and pasta, as I recall). While I was heading down a Tuscan highway on a Ducati Multistrada at around 90mph, a miniscule Fiat Panda passed me – aggressively in the right lane – and the driver, a wrinkled, blue-haired grandma-type, tossed me a hand-gesture that meant exactly what you think it meant. Ashamed, I pulled into the right lane where those of us pulling down a mere 90mph apparently belonged.
With frogmen on torpedoes and grandmas in flying Fiats on my mind, I suggest that Italian style has to remind you that death is imminent, and it has to do it with serious sex appeal. That’s as true for a an Italian motorcycle as it is for a wristwatch or a pair of handmade horse-bit loafers.
Decidedly Neither Swiss Nor German
Swiss dive watches like the Rolex Submariner and the Blancpain Fifty-Fathoms are wonderful little machines, but can we just finally admit that Swiss dive watches fall on the snoozy side of awesome? A Swiss dive watch is, at best, a tribute to safety. A Panerai is a tribute to suicidal underwater missions carried out with a torpedo between your legs.
The back of my Panerai Submersible sports an engraving of a torpedo with two frogmen straddling it. My Panerai is a steam-punk-ish reminder that Italians were getting in the dark, cold sea to face death in an era when you still needed a steel lever to hold the watch’s crown down. Panerai were keeping time at depth long before Swiss dive watches like the Rolex Submariner or the Blancpain Fifty-Fathoms became lifestyle accoutrements for civilians. Panerai was there first, when diving was truly dangerous.
That Panerai’s designs grew out of a hair-brained, suicidal, military-industrial challenge and then went on to become the foundation of a Swiss luxury watch brand is deeply ironic. That’s some heavy brand DNA right there. If you think about a Panerai watch even for a moment – including one with a bright white dial and Prada co-branding – it will likely bring mortality to mind. I can’t think of a Swiss watch that packs such a strong semantic charge.
As for motorcycles, I’ve owned my share of BMWs. There’s a 175hp BMW sport bike in my garage right now. It’s insanely fast, and it’s pretty fun, but – as cliche as this is going to sound – it lacks character. Even with the full aftermarket exhaust and a burbling ECU remap, that BMW is nowhere close to as snarly and fun as the stock XDiavel V4 I just flicked through fabulous twisties in Southern France. And just about nothing looks as sexy as the new XDiavel.
Despite being loaded with industry-leading safety tech and offering flawless handling that inspired instant confidence in this rider, the new XDiavel V4 still felt crazy to ride. To be clear, crazy is a very good quality – and, as I’m attempting to argue, it’s essential to Italian style. Was it like throwing my leg over a torpedo? Yeah, kind of.
The XDiavel V4 is billed as a “sport cruiser,” which is a bonafide oxymoron. It doesn’t look even remotely like a bike you would lean way over in a corner, but wow does it lean right over. Sitting on it with your feet locked into the proverbial gynocologist’s stirrups doesn’t make you feel like you could flick it back and forth, but you sure can, effortlessly. Drop a gear or two and twist the throttle, and you’re doing a laid-back wheelie inside the wonderful blur of Italian acceleration. (The engine is in my top-three favorites; the other two are also Italian.)
The XDiavel V4 truly rides like a sport bike, but it looks more like something you’d want to take to bed and make love to all night long, stopping only to smoke expensive cigarettes, sip negronis, and listen to whatever that music in Felllini’s Dolce Vita is.
I sincerely can’t come up with a comparison for the XDiavel V4. And I can’t think of a watch at all like my Panerai Submersible. These are both wonderfully weird, and decidedly Italian, machines.
Nothing Like a Panerai Submersible or a Ducati XDiavel
I wore my Panerai Submersible to ride the Ducati XDiavel V4 thinking it’d be fun, maybe a little clever, but what I didn’t see coming was the deeper synergy between these two products.
Both are capable of reminding me that life is gloriously fragile, especially when you willingly put a huge engine between your legs and accelerate. Both the bike and the watch look uniquely interesting – and, to my eye, beautiful – because their designers prioritize aesthetic concerns in tandem with technical ones. Both the Ducati XDiavel and the Panerai Submersible look brutish, powerful, and masculine, but also sexy, considered and well composed. Both use cutting-edge materials and technology, but neither makes a big deal out of it, instead allowing their distinctive, sexy designs to come forward and ask you to embrace your mortality – and to look good doing it.
I’m pretty sure that’s pretty Italian.