Hodinkee
“La Pilota” – A New Tudor Film Tells the Story Of A Record-Setting Aviator and Her Watches
In Greek mythology, there is the well-known story of Icarus, a heady youth whose lofty aspirations send him flying on homemade wings of feathers and wax. In its cautionary denouement, Icarus flies too high and gets too close to the sun, melting the wax, sending him crashing back to Earth. If Carina Massone Negrone knew the story of Icarus, she would also likely have known that the greater the altitude, the danger is not the sun's heat but extreme cold and a lack of oxygen. And yet, in 1935, the Italian aviator set an altitude record in an open-cockpit piston-powered airplane that remains unbroken to this day. Tudor has just debuted a short documentary film about Negrone, called "La Pilota: The Daring Story of Marchesa Carina Massone Negrone", which covers the flying pioneer's remarkable life and the watches—Tudors, of course—that she wore. Carina Massone Negrone was a "marchesa," a noblewoman by her marriage to a marquise, and could have enjoyed a life of ease in her palazzo in Genova. But her adventurous spirit compelled her to pursue activities that might have seemed "unladylike" in 1930s Italy. She was an avid swimmer and skier and fished the Mediterranean for sharks. And in 1933, at the age of 22, she took flying lessons from an Italian fighter pilot and became the first woman to get her pilot's license from the Reale Unione Nazionale Aeronautica. Only a year later, she set an altitude record for a seaplane by flying to 5,544 meters. But she wasn't done yet—far f...
