Buongiorno; Buonasera; Happy Friday!
I’m starting today’s newsletter over breakfast in a café in Rome, where I tacked a few days onto a business trip that had stops in Zurich, Basel, and Milan.
Between full days of meetings and wine-fueled dinners, it would be easy to lose track of what’s happened—including all the wonderful in-between moments that define a great trip. My mom has a habit of writing notes from each day before bed every night when she travels. I haven’t been that disciplined, but yesterday I spent a rainy Sunday morning jotting a log of each day since I’d left LA, ten days prior.
Recording your activities and observations this way is one small trick for making a trip feel longer—and of course, retaining the memories from it. “Any interval feels longer if you have more memories stored,” cognitive psychologist Marc Wittman told me last year. If you’re anticipating your own spring travel, here’s a guide to making your time away feel longer.
Speaking of time, my first stop was Baselworld, the Swiss mega-trade show where watchmakers show off their newest models. Last year, visiting the same show, I lamented the fact that I was decidedly not a “watch person.” I liked watches, to be sure, but was afraid I didn’t entirely appreciate their mechanical wonder. Gary Shteyngart’s “Confessions of a Watch Geek” in the New Yorker helped with this, illustrating how in an uncertain world, there’s something extra special about a timepiece that doesn’t need servers or batteries.
“On a quartz watch, the second hand goose-steps along one tick at a time; on a mechanical watch, it glides imperfectly, but beautifully, around the dial and into the future,” he writes. Recounting a panic attack on a stuck subway train, he recalls: “Looking at the smooth, antiquated mechanical glide of my watch’s second hand, I felt, if not calm, then ready for whatever happened next.”
At this year’s Baselworld, I found a handful of mechanical watches to fall in love with, models by Patek Philippe, Grand Seiko, Chanel, Rolex, and Laurent Ferrier among them (above). At the Zurich airport, I bought something a little simpler: a stripey Quartz-powered Swatch, not unlike the round-faced, rubber-banded model I wore as an elementary schooler.
All week, I’ve enjoyed how it frees me from checking the time on my phone. At 60 Swiss Francs, it wasn’t a heart-stopping splurge, but I now worry it was a gateway watch.
To stay in the moment between destinations. I’ve long been a fan of the Instagram account @carsinfrontofhouses, devoted to ”exploring the unique relationship between houses and the cars parked in front of them.” Rob Birdsong, a New York-based creative producer, curates the crowd-sourced photographs and has amassed a following of several thousand travel-, automobile-, and architecture-loving aesthetes.
Navigating my way between meetings and tourist destinations, I found keeping my eyes peeled for interesting car-house pairings made me more attentive to the everyday beauty in my environs. Wherever you are, if you feel like doing the same, just post and tag your Instagrams @carsinfrontofhouses.
Should you find yourself in Milan (I see you, Salone del Mobile attendees) may I suggest a visit to the Villa Necchi Campiglio? I had about three free hours in the city and opted for this very digestible treat over the Duomo.
Nestled in a park in a tony section of the city, this furnished masterpiece of modernist (tbh, fascist) architecture was designed by Piero Portaluppi—one of Mussolini’s favorites—for Angelo Campiglio, a sewing machine magnate, and his family.
The €10 guided tours are succinct, and you’re welcome to linger by the poppy-bordered pool. (Pro tip: look for the flamingos in the neighbors’ yard afterward.)
If you can’t make it to Milan, you might experience the home the way I initially did: as the setting for Luca Guadagnino’s exquisite 2009 film starring Tilda Swinton, I Am Love. Said the director: “In a way, Villa Necchi makes me think of a ship of fools—it was completed right before World War II, when people still thought naïvely that everything was going to be all right and believed in this idea of conquering the future, except that the future was about constant labor to maintain a select few.”
WWJD? When my phone buzzed with the news that Jenna Lyons, J.Crew’s president, creative director, and most public face, would be leaving the company, I was at the Trevi Fountain in Rome—wearing my navy J.Crew menswear-style wool jacket.
J.Crew is a company that many people, myself included, feel a deeply personal connection with. As a high-schooler in St. Louis, MO in the 1990s, I would turn down the corners of catalogue pages showing the barn jackets, rugby shirts, and roll-neck sweaters I longed for.
For Quartz, I wrote that one could easily see Lyons’ departure as the end of an era. But her mark goes far beyond J.Crew, or even fashion. Jenna Lyons’ impact is about style and attitude as much as it is about clothing—about eschewing “perfection” in favor of one’s personal quirks. To watch her work—or to read about it—is to see the way she empowers those around her, whether by collaborating with employees she genuinely cares for, or emboldening women to treat leopard spots as a neutral, menswear as womenswear, and pajamas as clothes. I imagine that many of her cohorts and fans, at J.Crew and beyond, already ask themselves when faced with decisions: “What would Jenna do?”
I, for one, am excited to see what she does next. Have a great weekend!
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Happy hour, Italian-style. The greatest time of day in Italy is aperitivo time, which falls sometime between the end of the workday and dinner. Inspired by a drink I tried at Le Biciclette—a Milan bar where partakers piled their plates with focaccia, frittatas, potato chips, and blistered peppers—I’ll celebrate my first Friday back with a concoction of 1 1/2 ounces Cynar and 1/2 sweet vermouth, topped up with soda, a shake of bitters, and a twist of lemon. Do try this at home. Alla salute!