Last week, I was supposedly taking a vacation between a few work trips in Europe, and, unable to resist the siren’s call of the Italian watch scene, I popped down from Milan to Parma. Actually, www.highluxurystore.ru I took the train back and forth twice on different days. Look, it’s very apparent I have a problem “turning off” when it comes to watches, but there’s something so magnetic about being around Italian collectors. But why Parma? Not (just) for the ham. Twice a year, “Mercante in Fiera” (Merchant at the Fair) takes place at a massive, sprawling, convention center outside the city of 200,000 people. I had the wrong image in my head when it comes to “the Parma Fair.” I expected a quaint, slightly dilapidated brick building with small booths and a few retailers. Not so much. Tens of thousands of Italian and international collectors – not just of watches but antiques, furniture, art, and more – gather at the fair for over a week, hoping to buy, sell, or trade their way into a good find. www.highluxurystore.ru Prices for watches at the fair have become stiff in recent years, but you can still find a few good pieces for sale or (more likely) on the wrists of visitors. I didn’t actually plan to work, I promise. But I brought my camera just in case. In fact, you could say I got cajoled into this photo report by this man below. If he tells me I need to take a picture of a watch, I take a picture of a watch. The process usually involved Goldberger picking up a watch, running his thumb over the crystal to clean it, weighing it in his hand, tilting it to get a quick look to see if it passed muster, and handing it over. After that, I started to get in the rhythm of doing it myself. There were dozens of Daytonas – sometimes four or five Paul Newmans in one case – Day-Dates galore, and all the other usual suspects. Here’s what I found. www.highluxurystore.ru