Romeo Ferraris

Romeo Angelo Ferraris began his career in motorsport in 1959, working on Giancarlo Baghetti's Lancia racecar; over the decades that followed his workshop would go on to claim 69 championship titles and more than a thousand race victories. In 1965 he opened his own facility on Via Lambro in Opera, just outside Milan, developing racecars, custom aerodynamic components, and performance upgrades for cars of any make, while also restoring historic vehicles. His feel for precision mechanics runs in the family — he inherited a passion for engines from his grandfather and father before turning that same instinct toward micro-mechanics.

That shift toward watchmaking had a specific origin: in the 1990s, a watch given to him as a gift by a close friend redirected Ferraris's engineering skill from cars to horology. Over roughly a decade of travel and research, he became the first — and, by his own account, only — Italian manufacturer capable of producing virtually every component of a watch from scratch, with the exception of the escapement itself, sourcing and restoring antique manual machinery along the way to revive techniques that had nearly disappeared from the craft, including hand enamelling and hand silvering. Nearly thirty years into the project, Romeo Ferraris now runs the entire process in-house at the Opera workshop — researching and developing cases and movement modules, and hand-crafting straps — with every watch, in the words of the brand itself, 'born from the pen and hands of Romeo.' Output is accordingly tiny, at around four or five watches a year, each essentially a unique or near-unique piece rather than a production model.

The range includes the Superleggero, billed as the lightest chronograph in the world, the single-button Brunico — built around a heavily reworked Valjoux 22 movement converted to coaxial monopusher actuation through the crown and cased in 40mm steel — the Firenze, and the Classico Coassiale line, which continues a single-button chronograph tradition Ferraris has pursued since at least the early 2000s, when he produced 18k gold monopusher pieces numbered and signed by hand. He has represented Italian independent watchmaking on panels such as the inaugural Milano Watch Week's 'The Art of Being Italian: Between Haute Horlogerie and Creative Geniuses,' alongside fellow Italian makers Luca Soprana, Jacopo Corvo, Jacopo Giudici, and Michele Mengoli.