CN Orologi
CN Orologi, the watch house of CN Milano Srl, is the creation of Chiara Nardo, founder and creative director, who has designed the Italiano in Milan since 2020. Nardo says she grew up moving from one Italian city to another and cannot name a single place she belongs to; what shaped her instead was a shared culture of living, observing, and designing, and Italiano is the name she gave that identity. She describes her work as a balance of opposites — classic and contemporary, rigorous and natural, understated and sophisticated — aimed at making an identity visible rather than amazing the viewer. The design, the CN brand, and the Italiano logotype are registered with EUIPO and WIPO, and the brand says every part was designed and made exclusively for this watch.
The Italiano is conceived as a design language rather than a single model. Its logo moves off the dial centre to the two o'clock index position, where it doubles as the number 2; the screw-down crown has two opposite concave cuts for a two-finger grip and always returns with the logo horizontal; no two adjacent surfaces share a finish, alternating polished, brushed, and sandblasted so that bright faces sit in protected cuts while exposed ones are matte; and green and red accents under the crystal nod to Italian identity. It is a Swiss Made automatic on a Sellita SW200, in 316L steel with a solid integrated bracelet of screwed links, a sapphire crystal of 2,200 Vickers, and Super-LumiNova C3 on indexes and hands, measuring 41.8mm across and 11mm thick in the 42 collection.
Customisation is central. An online configurator lets buyers choose the case and bracelet or rubber strap, caseback, dial colour and accents, a movement and rotor option, caseback text, a dial signature, and a customised date, with each personalisation overseen personally by Nardo as a made-to-measure project. In the 42mm collection, the first series carries a numbered sapphire caseback and a standard date wheel at 100 metres, while the second has a closed caseback printed with a lire coin and a date wheel bearing the CN logo at 2, rated to 200 metres. Orafix, L'Orologio, Watches of Italy, and WatchCrunch have all praised its visual identity, and WatchCrunch singled out the direct contact with the designer.
The range is arranged in three collections. The 42 Millimeters, the first iconic edition, comes in Cortina Snow (white), Nero di Seppia (black), and Blu Mediterraneo (blue), at €1,750 on the bracelet or €1,550 on an FKM rubber strap. The DLC collection hardens the steel with a diamond-like carbon coating in Deep Black or Gun Metal, at €1,930, with the Deep Black Nero di Seppia now unavailable. The 39mm Stones of Italy, a Limited Numbered Edition, is dressed in the colours of Italian stones — Bianco di Carrara, Verde Alpi, and Notte a Positano — with casebacks that celebrate a fond memory of Italian history, on the Notte a Positano the 100 lire coin. That model's dial is blue goldstone, a copper-flecked glass said by legend to have come from Venetian alchemists in the 17th century, and a small red CN logo appears in its date window on the 2nd of each month. Prices run from €1,550 to €2,150, the latter for the 39mm Verde Alpi in Gun Metal DLC.