Who I am
My passion for ticking objects.
I grew up coddled by the most classic of all Italian families and when I turned 18, I was gifted with an amazing Breitling Chronomat watch that marked my entrance into manhood.
My first job was as an apprentice to a master restorer of antique furniture, whose knowledge was invaluable to me. Not so much in a technical sense - since the techniques were different compared to those used to restore watches - as the approach required to bring back an object to its primordial beauty.
Back then, I used to seek out objects for the pleasure of discovery and observation, rarely to purchase them. The best of times was on Sunday early mornings, when I used to go to the market of Porta Portese, exploring its hidden corners and hunting down my objects of desire: timepieces.
Nevertheless, trading was funny and engaging. Sometimes I haggled over the price, occasionally I tried to swap, other times playing the card of naivety.
Everything seemed to be going quite smoothly, until one Sunday I stumbled into a chronograph I never saw before: a black dial, a triangle bezel and a very light extendable bracelet. To get my attention, the street trader said: "Mind you, this watch is the first Speedmaster ever made!". I replied: "In fat, it does seem particular, quite old...! I never saw it before. Is it authentic?". I tried to haggle a bit over the price, because I knew what it was, but I never saw it personally before I knew it was the iconic "Speedmaster".
From that day on, I fell in love with this model, so much so that the watch, which is published in the front pages of my book "Magister-A Unique Andrea Foffi Speedmaster Selection". Is still in my possession. At that time I bought without giving too much weight to the models but relying only on my instinct and there was still no knowledge of watchmaking.
Then the millennium changed and I grew up.
I started to look around and I got my eye on Lidia and I fell in love with her. Ours was a story written in the stars, given the fact that we were both born and raised in the same building.
She has been the one person that believed in me since I was 20 years old and together with me, she created this job of watch "merchant" and she travelled everywhere to hunt down watches of any brand. While we travelled all over Italy from north to south, someone started to know us and appreciate my taste and my collections; she created exhibitions that were anything but ordinary for various markets in Rome and organized events in Bologna and Florence. Together with Lidia I shared all my decisions and I do it still today. She became my wife and since a few decades I share with her and our children, Giada and Nicoló.
I started travelling and meeting collectors, initially in Europe, in the United States and then later on in the Arab countries and in Japan.
In the last thirty years, I always kept storing away, perhaps with a bit of reasonable jealousy too, all the most beautiful watches I had the chance to encounter.
I found some of them incidentally, possibly in a shop or thanks to a friend collector; I stubbornly chased some others crossing different continents; and in other cases, I participated both in renowned or uncharted auctions. Because what drives me is passion and I have been lucky to have been able to turn it into work.