Finally, we finish our Super Tuscan bottles and start talking watches.
“I fell in love with watches when I was eight,” Fratini says. For his First Communion, his parents gave him a gold-capped Longines. “Nothing fancy or important,” he assures me. This, he says, is when his love story began.
When he turned 18, he bought his gold-capped Rolex. The steel peeks through the gold on the crown, but the watch is in nice condition – worn but cared for.
“There was already a passion at that time,” Fratini says, “from opening the watch and seeing the mechanism, understanding how every single wheel and screw was essential to the watch’s functioning. Every little piece played its part in contributing to the passage of time.” Fratini makes the analogy to humans, saying that we all play an important part in moving forward together. It’s an oft-repeated cliché, but delivered in the slow and deliberate English of Fratini, a man who’s dedicated as much time as anyone to learning about and acquiring vintage watches, it’s romantic.
Instead of talking watches overlooking the rolling Tuscan landscape, sipping a deep red Chianti Classico as I might’ve imagined, we leave the hotel restaurant and arrive at a nondescript three-story office building across from the old Rifle Jeans facility that could’ve been plucked out of suburban Chicago just as easily as Barberino. We head to the second floor, past a few large Rifle Jeans posters advertising “authentic cowboy pants” and depicting scenes from the old American West – or, how an Italian must’ve imagined the old American West – complete with a cowboy riding a bucking horse.
A security guard punches a long security code into the door’s keypad and opens the door to an anti-climactic reveal: a small conference room overflowing with Rifle Jeans memorabilia and pieces of watch retailer displays that years ago would’ve been used to exhibit the newest Rolex or Patek Philippe watches.
In the middle is a walnut dining table that’s too fancy and too big for the conference room. This is where the security guard unfurls a watch roll to lay out the small section of Fratini’s collection we get to see today. There is a collection of triple calendar Vacheron Constantin “Cioccolatone” watches in every metal (rose gold, yellow gold, and platinum), deemed such by Italian collectors like Fratini for their resemblance to a chocolate bar. In total, Vacheron produced less than 50 of these complicated Cioccolatones all metals in the mid-’50s, and three of the surviving examples are together on this table. I recognize the platinum example as having been acquired at Sotheby’s about six months prior for CHF 604,000, where it was described as “possibly unique.” Seventy years old and still buying what he loves.
Alongside the Cioccolatones are a handful of enamel dial watches from Vacheron and Patek. Of the many sub-collections within Fratini’s massive collection, modern collectors often overlook the enamel dials, or perhaps just less understood than many of his other watches. But it’s clear Fratini understands the beauty of these watches, and it seems like this is exactly why he’s chosen them today. Casalegno and I are both younger enthusiasts. Fratini sees the opportunity to show us something we might not see anywhere else and educate us a bit, no matter what the all-consuming “market” might say about enamel dials from the middle of the 20th century. One Patek depicts a woman playing tennis; another, a Vacheron with a pair of seahorses. All have gorgeous matching gold bracelets.
Like the Vacheron Cioccolatones, these enamel dial watches aren’t at the forefront of most collecting conversations today. Fratini insists that the only common thread tying together the many enamels in his collection is that he buys what he likes.
“I like enamels that I believe are authentic works of art,” he says. “I think of whoever made them, how they were made, and the difficulty of making them.” Like the wheels and screws of a movement, the artisan plays their part in creating something beautiful. These techniques took a long time and extraordinary skill; today, everything is simplified to take less time, Fratini says.
Then there’s the crown jewel: a pink-on-pink Patek 1518, with a long “Patek Philippe & Co.” signature, showing that Patek made it before 1948, when it moved to a shortened dial signature. Its oversized Arabic numerals make it unique and modern. Still, its warm pink case and dial, with just a bit of cracking, is unmistakably vintage, giving the watch the type of character Fratini appreciates.
Because of his work with the denim company his father founded, Fratini says he often traveled across the world. Wherever he found himself, he’d steal time to hunt for watches. Initially, he didn’t have many competitors researching or buying watches like he was. By the early 1980s, he began making big-time purchases, starting with watches like the Patek Philippe 130 chronograph and 1920s and ‘30s rectangular Rolex Oyster Princes. He acquired his first Patek 1518 by 1984.
Fratini says he doesn’t wear many of the watches with higher (monetary) value like this 1518 or the handful of others he owns, explaining that he prefers to keep them for his enjoyment, not to display publicly. Surely, there’s also a safety concern, but that’s secondary.
“I never think about the value,” he adds. While he acknowledges that the value of many of the watches in his collection has increased exponentially in the 50-plus years he’s been acquiring watches, it doesn’t seem like a motivating factor of his. Fratini has other business ventures for making money; watches are his passion.
Besides, Fratini says he doesn’t sell any of the watches he acquires. Perhaps this has changed in the past year or so, as a few watches have appeared at auction that Fratini documented in My Time, the book he published in collaboration with Christie’s describing his collection in 2018. But nothing more than a few rare Arabic dial Rolex Day-Dates and a (probably unique) black dial Cartier Tank Asymétrique from the 1930s. These are a relative footnote when you have a collection like Fratini does. Still, Fratini doesn’t call himself a collector.
“We speak about love and passion, not collecting,” Fratini says. “I don’t collect watches. I love them.”