Tradition with modernity

Tradition and modernity can live in the same watch. On one side, a traditional Swiss hand-wound movement with more than fifty years on the road and a reputation for reliability. On the other, a titanium case so light, twenty-one grams, that the watch blends into the wrist and disappears. I knew the weight from the spec sheet before it arrived, and still, on the first day, I took it off twice to check it was there.

Its name is Rivanera, and the brand is echo/neutra.

A brand in a valley

echo/neutra is Italian, founded in 2018 by two partners who came from different sides: Nicola Callegaro, a designer, and Cristiano Quaglia, an aerospace engineer. The company is based in Averara, a village in the Val Brembana at the foot of the Dolomites, in the province of Bergamo.

Design in the Italian Alps, production in the Swiss ones: the watches are drawn in Averara and assembled in Switzerland with Swiss calibres, which earns them the “Swiss made” on the dial. The brand's first collection was the Cortina 1956, vintage-looking, named after a ski resort. The Rivanera is the other end: two years of design, according to the brand, to arrive at a dress watch that looks like no other dress watch.

As for the name, the brand does not explain it and I could not find out. It stays open.

The Rivanera

It is rectangular, 27 by 40 millimetres, and 5.5 millimetres thick without the crystal, 5.9 with it. The case is grade 5 titanium, the aluminium-and-vanadium alloy used in aviation, fine-grain bead-blasted with polished edges. That contrast is where the effect comes from: from a distance it is matte and discreet, up close every edge catches a line of light.

The dial has applied, faceted indices of art déco inspiration and a minute track from the same period. The hands are thin. There is almost nothing written on it. Reviewers called the whole thing “minimalist neo-gothic”, which is an elegant way of saying it is not trying to look like a Tank, nor to look old.

Flat sapphire crystal, 30 metres of water resistance, a pull-out crown.

The Rivanera joins the extremes, and not only in the watch. The rectangular case, the art déco indices and the thin hands make it a dress watch; the blasted titanium and the black rubber strap, which comes in the box alongside a green cordovan leather one, make it a Saturday watch. I wear it both ways. On leather it goes to dinner; on rubber it goes to the street, on trips, on the day the shirt is a T-shirt. It is the same union of tradition and modernity that exists inside, only in style.

The case back is transparent. And that is where the part I most like to tell lives.

The 1971 calibre

Inside it beats an ETA 7001, born as the Peseux 7001.

Peseux was an ébauche maker, the “blank” movements that brands finished, founded in 1923 by Charles Berner in the town of Peseux, in the canton of Neuchâtel. The house specialised in small, thin movements, oval and tonneau, for ladies' and dress watches. In 1933 it joined the group that would become ETA, but kept operating under its own name for decades, until it was dissolved as a company in 1979.

The 7001 appeared in the early seventies. It is a hand-wound calibre 23.3 millimetres across and 2.5 millimetres thick, 17 jewels, 21,600 beats per hour and 42 hours of reserve. Hours and minutes in the centre, small seconds at six. An architecture so simple it became the base for generations of thin watches.

It arrived at the worst possible moment. In 1971 quartz was already on the market and the following decade nearly took the whole Swiss mechanical industry with it. The 7001 survived by being exactly what it was: cheap to make, thin, reliable and easy to dress with any dial. Omega, Tissot, Longines, Mido, Blancpain, Oris and Bell & Ross used it. More than two million are said to have been made, a number the sources repeat without anyone being able to confirm it.

ETA stopped production around 2004, resumed in 2011 and, since then, the stock has been dwindling. Today the 7001 is a calibre you find, not one you order, and in 2023 La Joux-Perret launched the D100 with the same dimensions to take its place. Having a new 7001 in 2025, in a watch launched in December 2024, is having one of the last.

A digression I did not know until I wrote this: NOMOS used the Peseux 7001 in the Tangente from 1992 to 2005, and kept modifying it over those years, hacking seconds, the Glashütte three-quarter plate, the click. In 2005 it began making the Alpha calibre, which is, in the description of those who studied both, the 7001 with the NOMOS modifications built in. The Alpha in my Orion Rose and the 7001 in the Rivanera are close relatives. Two dress watches, the German and the Italian, with the same Swiss grandfather from 1971.

Microbrand, independent, or both

There is a debate that keeps coming back: is echo/neutra a microbrand or an independent? I think the two words describe different things, and both fit.

Microbrand is about size and business model: a small team, direct sales through the website, no retail network, an off-the-shelf calibre instead of an in-house one. echo/neutra is that. Independent is about who is in charge: nobody above the two partners, no group, no shareholder defining the catalogue. It is that too.

What changes in practice, for the wearer, is what the brand chooses to do with that freedom. In the Rivanera the choice was to spend the money where you feel it: grade 5 titanium instead of steel, sapphire, a real Swiss calibre, finishing that survives a loupe. And to save where you do not: no in-house calibre, no store, no showcase packaging. It is a sum the big brands do the other way round.

What the log says

It arrived on 19 June. In the first thirty-four days it went on the wrist nine times. I had already said in the July Reel that this was the new-watch effect, and it was: up to 8 August, the last date in my spreadsheet, it had 15 entries out of 200, 7.5% of the rotation, eighth among twenty-seven watches, practically tied with the Cement Boy and the TAG Formula 1. Counting only the period it existed in the collection, it took 27% of my days. Nothing else came close in that window.

Fourteen of those days were work, six leisure, six holiday. It is the watch I put on when I do not want to think about watches. Twenty-one grams help.