Milan might be a global fashion and design capital, known for all the new residents that it is attracting – but even its most die-hard fans will admit that it can feel a bit airless after a while. So why not make like a Milanese and get away for a weekend or even a day? One of the city’s major boons is its proximity to great escapes, many of them taking less time to get to than it does to reach the Salone fairgrounds. 

About an hour away by high-speed rail, Bologna offers a striking counterpoint to the Lombard capital. It’s steeped in gastronomy and history, with a lively student population and a distinctly homegrown contemporary scene, far removed from Milan’s more self-conscious polish. Home to the world’s oldest university in continuous operation (founded in 1088), Bologna has long nurtured a spirit of political activism and idealism. It’s a freewheeling city with underground music venues and squats that foster a rebellious air. But this coexists with grandeur: terracotta piazzas, medieval towers and some of Italy’s most revered cooking.

“There’s a boom in interest in Bologna,” says Benedetta Barbieri, who runs Trattoria Montanara with her husband, Filippo Venturi. Their establishment is one of the city’s great culinary destinations, serving what Barbieri calls “home-style slow cooking from another era”. In an intimate dining room dating back to 1929, the couple serve classics such as lasagne, tortellini in brodo (stuffed pasta in meat broth) and cotoletta alla bolognese (pork cutlet with ham and parmesan) on flowered Bitossi dishes.

Such restaurants are the city’s lifeblood and there’s no shortage of casual spots serving lovingly prepared cuisine. Take Da Cesari, a dark-wood dining room featuring the region’s traditional block-printed tablecloths and wine made from grapes grown on a nearby countryside plot. Here, cooks prepare meatballs following a closely guarded recipe. Bar Paolo, meanwhile, founded in 1976 with a rounded steel bar, remains a local favourite, with no sign outside and no menu other than the options recited by the owner.

In a city full of old-school establishments, Ristorante Grassilli stands out for its combination of Bolognese seasonal dishes and imaginative combinations such as pumpkin risotto with taleggio, amaretto biscuit crumbs and pomegranate seeds. Here, a father-and-son team makes pasta by hand using rolling pins every morning; the younger of the two chefs, Jean David Durussel, describes the process as “traditional cuisine as an art”.

Bologna’s commitment to good eating has also kept its central market hopping. Mercato delle Erbe, rebuilt in 1949, is part grocery and part informal dining hall. Among its stalls is Bottiglieria delle Erbe, a market outpost that now has an additional outlet, Bottiglieria Vini Belli on Via Saragozza, drawing residents with small plates and wine from independent producers.

The city has a dynamic cultural scene. Besides live music (more bands stop here than in the larger Milan), film is a citywide passion – thanks, in part, to the remarkable archives of the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and the stunning Cinema Modernissimo, a Liberty-era theatre restored to its former splendour.

The Quadrilatero district has been a centre of trade since the Middle Ages, with narrow streets lined with fruit stands and artisanal shops. Roccati serves freshly made chocolate truffles; the Aguzzeria del Cavallo, founded in 1783, is one of Bologna’s oldest shops and sells unique goods such as handcrafted bird whistles, knives and pasta tools.

A short walk will take you to the Due Torri: two 900-year-old towers that are currently undergoing work to address problems caused by foundation subsidence but remain a striking sight. And onwards to Via Santo Stefano, which hosts an antiques market on the second weekend of every month. The pedestrianised street is home to some of the city’s beautiful porticos, which have Unesco World Heritage status.

“Fabulous food is attracting a lot of visitors to Bologna but there’s much more to this city,” says designer Allison Hoeltzel. She recommends making time for contemporary-art museum Mambo and the Museo Morandi, which displays work by the Bolognese artist. The Archiginnasio, a 16th-century Renaissance palace, holds Bologna’s oldest library, as well as an anatomical theatre built in 1637, which is covered in wood and decorated with spooky statues originally made to aid medical students.

Hoeltzel, who designs a line of artisanal bags, shoes and clothes under the Officina del Poggio label, also suggests grabbing a glass of wine and immersing yourself in the city’s vibrant social fabric. Cosy and classic Enoteca Storica Faccioli serves natural wines, while Bottiglieria Vini Belli offers a more modern take. “People value community and like to have a fun time here,” she says. “That’s a big part of what defines the good life.”

Gilda Bojardi is a Milan design titan who seems to know everyone on the scene. A resident of Brera since she graduated from university, she began working for interiors and contemporary-design magazine Interni in the 1980s and has been its editor since 1994.

She welcomes us just outside Milan at the Segrate headquarters of publishing group Mondadori, which owns the magazine. The building, an Oscar Niemeyer-designed palazzo from 1975, was inspired by the Brazilian architect’s foreign ministry building in Brasília. “It was almost an obligation to make you see this place,” says Bojardi on Interni’s editorial floor, which was recently refreshed (including a refit of the original USM furniture).

Bojardi was a key player in the development of Fuorisalone. She has published a guide to its events since 1990 and, at one point, even helped to organise buses to the centre of Milan. Since 1998, she has been putting on her own events under the Interni banner. This year’s showcase, called Materiae, features a collaboration between Audi and Zaha Hadid Architects, as well as installations by the Bjarke Ingels Group, Snøhetta and Milan-based architect and designer Michele de Lucchi, among others. Bojardi’s services to design have been recognised by the city. In 2007 the municipality awarded her its highest honour, the Ambrogino d’Oro. 

How did you start working at ‘Interni’?
After graduating in law, I worked for an important design studio but, after three months, I realised that it wasn’t for me. I then worked for a magazine called IN: Argomenti e immagini di Design and got to know design entrepreneurs, from Mario Bellini to Ettore Sottsass. After that I lived in Mexico City for a year. When I came back to Italy, at the end of the 1970s, I started to work for Artemide, alongside art director Roberto Beretta. I was offered a job at Interni after it was bought by Electa, the most important cultural publishing house in Europe. I started as an apprentice. 

You must have got to know so many great designers.
I had friendships with Ettore Sottsass, Alessandro Mendini, Ugo La Pietra and Vico Magistretti. And with Michele de Lucchi, Antonio Citterio, Giulio Cappellini, Paola Navone, Rodolfo Dordoni and others. We grew up at the same time. Everyone was either living on, or had a studio around, Via Solferino in Brera. We’re still very close but don’t see each other as much due to everyone’s work schedules.

How has your work changed?
It’s not that it has changed. It’s more that we do so many different things. Now we work with New York, London and Paris. We hold a lot of events with Italian cultural institutions. In January last year we organised an event celebrating the 2025 international edition of Interni at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. Our mission has always been to take Italian experiences abroad.

You have been instrumental in developing Fuorisalone. How did it all come about?
I invented the term. Salone del Mobile didn’t want its name to be used for outside events. I was staying at the Paramount Hotel in New York, just off Broadway and I said to myself, “Off-Broadway, off-Salone: Fuorisalone.” 

Tell us about your work leading up to Design Week.
The April edition of Interni has more than 430 pages. And then there are the events that we organise at the State University and Brera’s Botanical Garden. 

How do you have the energy to keep doing it?
The work is stressful but you also get so many stimuli from the extraordinary people you meet, whether it’s architects, designers or journalists. How will you discover new things without meeting people?

The new May issue of Monocle features our first-ever cover dedicated to watches. I am not sure why it has taken us 20 years but some things take time – slow, mechanical time.

Inside the issue – and on the cover – there’s a very cute shoot of handsome hounds being stroked by elegant watch-strapped hands. We’ve called the story “Watch Dogs” and it’s superb. It’s all the idea of our creative director, Richard Spencer Powell, and it’s so good that now he’s kind of screwed. Where, you wonder, can he go after nice pooches and glorious timepieces all shot by Jess Bonham, plus a very amusing headline? All week he has been suggesting that we should photograph sunglasses on cats and call the story “Cats’ Eyes”. But it was when he proffered that we do “hamsters in hats” that I told him to have the afternoon off.

Also in the issue is an idea of mine. I know, I still have them. It’s a simple story in which writers, designers, chefs, diplomats and divers tell the tale behind a watch that they wear. Creative Yorgo Tloupas was commissioned by the Greek prime minister to design the special edition Swatch that he sometimes sports (he has a lot of watches). Photographer Christopher Anderson bought his Omega Speedmaster because he was perhaps a little jealous of the one that his assistant had – but in the decades since it has become part of his work and also a constant reminder about the value of time. 

I have two nice watches. I will tell you about the first one. My parents had me late in life: my dad was hitting 50, my mum in her mid-forties. They had already raised a large family when I came along. This was not what they had planned. But they rolled with it. Yet, even as a child I could do the maths – unless they lived well into their eighties, I would be parentless in my thirties. I always liked my parents; there was no teenage tension with them. We made the most of things. But as the child predicted, in my thirties my dad died. My mum stayed until I was 44. 

The will was modest but there was a sum of money and rather than take a chip out of the mortgage, I decided to buy a watch as a way of keeping them both close, of acknowledging the passing of time. Today the click of the metal bracelet on my wrist sets me up for the day. The watch’s weight, its sauntering second hand, the way the green dial winks and glints as it catches candlelight, all bind me to a time and a place and to two people who set me on a pretty good path (even if they did head off a bit too soon).

Yet the other good thing about a watch is that it also knows how to let you get on with your day. It’s not a flashing digital display demanding your attention or the awful death march of time that emanates from a ticking antique clock. It’s just there when you need it, marking the seconds, counting the hours and quietly adding meaning to your day.

To read more from Andrew Tuck, click here. 

As early birds in Canada settled in for a leisurely morning with the weekend newspapers last Sunday, prime minister Mark Carney rustled that routine with some headlines of his own. In a pre-recorded video address published online – and out of the blue – the PM took a serious and sombre tone: “I know, from experience, that outside forces can sometimes seem overwhelming,” he began.  

Carney then proceeded, for 10 minutes or so, to elucidate the theme of his surprise address: “Forward Guidance”. This is the name of a practice that he implemented during his time as the governor of two central banks: a series of public updates launched amid the financial crisis of 2008 that unpicked and explained market tumult as it played out. The intention was to guide stakeholders through the measures being made to counter the financial collapse. “And that’s the spirit I’m talking to you about today,” he said. 

While the PM’s surprise appearance at breakfast time didn’t quite jolt the proverbial marmalade from atop the morning toast, it was, well, a bit of a shock nonetheless. Addresses such as these – grave, detailed, thought-out and delivered well – don’t usually arrive unannounced. This was a “fireside chat” for Canadians in the Trump era – a fatherly hand to hold in a complicated time. 

But where Franklin D Roosevelt’s conversational radio addresses to Americans – which elucidated the New Deal in the aftermath of the Great Depression and during the Second World War – were designed to reassure, Carney’s iteration seemed designed to brace Canadians, without stoking overt alarm, for further uncertainty to come. 

“Many of our former strengths, based on our close ties to America, have become our weaknesses,” Carney stated, in what swiftly became the speech’s headline in the blanket coverage by newsrooms across the country. “Weaknesses that we must correct.”

Many Canadians will tell you that they know this already – the national imagination has accepted the US’s upturned status. So why make this kind of speech, and why now? 

“I was surprised by it,” Tim Sayle, an assistant professor of history at the University of Toronto and director of its international relations programme, told Monocle. Sayle tracks political communication styles and their impacts. A straightforward answer is that the address’s cherry-picked nods to historical hurdles that Canada has faced in the past and the national mettle that overcame them are sandwiched between two major announcements – one upbeat, the other less so. 

The first, a landmark global investors’ conference in Toronto in September, which Carney announced last week. It’s a welcome response to the quickening pace of inward foreign investment into Canada, which has sped up since late last year. But the second is the upcoming review of Cusma, as it’s known up here, the renegotiated free-trade agreement between Canada, the US and Mexico – which is likely, once again, to become a battleground. 

“I have, personally, bemoaned the fact that Canadian leaders haven’t spoken to Canadians directly about issues of real concern enough,” says Sayle. “Governments tend to calculate that it’s safer, from a political perspective, not to address major subjects, especially geopolitical and international issues, head-on. Because there’s often little upside, and instead there’s a lot to lose by taking firm and even an explanatory position on things.” 

This, then, is new for a Canadian prime minister. But shifting the way a leader communicates with voters has been evident in Carney’s tenure from the outset – when he opted to reveal his political ambitions in public for the first time, not with a major Canadian broadcaster, but on The Daily Show in the US. From taking to the ice with Finland’s PM to cracking double-entendres at an event for steamy Canadian-made smash-hit TV drama Heated Rivalry and presenting Joni Mitchell with a lifetime-achievement award, Carney is a versatile political communicator. 

“[He is] achieving two things by doing this,” adds Sayle. “There is both a trajectory to his remarks but also what is quite purposeful repetition.” Carney’s star turn in Davos earlier this year, for example, sent a jolt through European capitals. But in its spirit it was a message that he had delivered to Canadian audiences multiple times before. “One is establishing a consistency and continuity in his ideas. But of course, he’s speaking to different audiences, so he’s also using the opportunity to introduce those ideas for the first time to those who haven’t heard his remarks elsewhere.”

That is all in contrast, of course, to the everything-everywhere-all-at-once communications strategy of Carney’s counterpart south of the border. The strategies couldn’t be more different but the goal is arguably the same – to control the narrative before events, or rivals, do it for you. A key to Carney’s success as a communicator is his consideration of who is listening and why, rather than sapping attention spans for the sake of doing so or simply shooting the breeze or shouting into the wind. “Let’s keep going,” said Carney, to sign off his message, the first of more to come. “Thank you for your time. I know it’s precious.”

Further reading:
‘You can’t be truly sovereign by yourself’: Mark Carney talks to Monocle about geopolitical pragmatism and a confident Canada

On film: Monocle in conversation with Prime Minister Mark Carney

Milan Design Week comes to a close this weekend but it’s not exactly a neat conclusion. The presence of industries with design adjacencies (namely car brands, hospitality groups and fashion houses) was in retreat for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic, with budgets tightening amid economic and geopolitical volatility. No overarching aesthetic emerged to rival last year’s dominance of stainless steel and its seductive palette of deep reds, nor the cream bouclé and soft shapes of the year before that. It seems that the zeitgeist is too elusive, too fractured to be neatly summed up.

Nonetheless, Milan Design Week did its usual sweeping through the Lombard capital, prying open the courtyard gates of palazzos for events and installations. At cocktail parties in church cloisters, DJs became high priests for the night, lording over congregations of characters plucked out of a film by Paolo Sorrentino – feather dresses and shiny suits included. In the streets of Porta Venezia, negronis were consumed until the early hours of the morning under banners blazing “Design is act” – one to ponder on the walk home.

In the light of day, exhibitions offering a more intellectual narrative proved to be the most popular. Visitors to the brutalist Torre Velasca queued for hours to see showcases on Polish modernism and the legacy of Jorge Zalszupin, the Poland-born designer associated with Brazilian modernism. It was a soft-power coup from the Visteria Foundation – the Polish cultural institute dedicated to the global promotion of the country’s design and craft scene. The Triennale Milano, meanwhile, explored the legacy of design across three exhibitions: one chronicling the history of Danish furniture company Fredericia; another about British designers Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby; and finally an inside look at the Eames House – now being developed on by Spanish manufacturer Kettal.

Elsewhere, intellectualisation went a step further by removing design completely from the equation and focusing on ideas. This was most apparent with the fashion houses partaking in Milan Design Week – and perhaps a hint at the deeper existentialism pervading the industry as it recalibrates after a period of change. Jil Sander’s creative director, Simone Bellotti, launched the Reference Library, an exhibition of 60 titles chosen by the likes of Swedish singer Lykke Li and American film director Sofia Coppola. Miu Miu returned with its book club, which explored the politics of desire through the writings of French novelist Annie Ernaux and Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo. Prada’s annual symposium, Prada Frames, looked at the role of image-making as a feature of our contemporary culture.

This all coincides with the rise of collectable design, be it of one-off marvels, rare antiques or objects that blur the line between design and art. Even the week’s anchor event, Salone del Mobile, a bastion of industrial and contract design, is getting in on the action with Salone Raritas, a new section of the fair reserved for collectable work.

Ultimately, there is some irony that the design world – an industry preoccupied with form and aesthetics – is seeking to transcend itself. But as brands compete for buyers and try to make sense of the times, it’s perhaps unsurprising that their first instinct is to search for a deeper meaning – in whichever shape or form it might appear.

Grace Charlton is Monocle’s associate editor of fashion and design. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

At Portuguese construction and engineering group DST’s sprawling hub in the northern city of Braga, a landscape of factories and warehouses is punctuated by site-specific artworks by the likes of Pedro Cabrita Reis and Miguel Palma. Workers in hi-vis vests and trucks move through the grounds, which also host open-air poetry readings, theatre performances and philosophy classes. It is an unusual convergence of worlds: the hardy, industrial reality of construction, and the utopian terrain of art and ideas. Yet DST’s CEO, José Teixeira, has placed culture at the centre of the business his father founded in the 1940s – first as a quarry, and today comprising more than 60 companies, from telecommunications to renewables, and about 4,000 employees worldwide.

“Architecture, art, philosophy and the search for beauty play an instrumental role in the products that companies create,” says Teixeira, who has amassed one of the country’s most significant private art collections and moves seamlessly between speaking about prefabricated homes and Susan Sontag quotes. Now, Teixeira is extending his ambition beyond the company grounds with the opening of Muzeu, a contemporary art museum in Braga’s historic centre. 

If DST’s campus brings art into the everyday lives of factory workers, the museum brings something of the factory floor to its visitors. Housed in a former courthouse adjacent to the town hall, the building’s five floors have been reworked with an industrial language of exposed steel beams and concrete, conceived by local architect José Carvalho Araújo. Other elements – such as sculptural bronze doors by Portuguese artist José Pedro Croft and ochre brick roofs – reference Renaissance Florence. Teixeira seems to embrace the role of the art patron. “I would like DST to be seen as a renaissance figure of the 21st century,” he says. “A patron in the sense that artists, poets, novelists, musicians shouldn’t have to wait for the state to step in.”

The inaugural exhibition, Sejamos realistas, exijamos o impossível (Let us be realistic, let us demand the impossible), brings together works by major international names, such as Alex Katz, Nan Goldin and Annie Leibovitz, alongside leading Portuguese artists, including Ângela Ferreira, Pedro Calapez and Ana Vidigal. Other pieces by both emerging and established artists in Teixeira’s 1,500-strong collection also feature, while there are also a series of planned conferences, performances and workshops. A permanent space on the top floor is dedicated to works by Anselm Kiefer. “It’s the only one of its kind – if you want to see it, you have to come to Braga,” says Teixeira.

As Portugal’s third-largest city, Braga has long drawn visitors to its historic centre and baroque churches. The city also has one of the country’s highest birth rates, along with a young and dynamic workforce in engineering and technology. Yet its cultural programming has remained understated, until now. With Muzeu, Teixeira hopes that will shift. “We aspire to the Bilbao effect,” he says. 
muzeu.com

The Foreign Desk has become a regular visitor to – and participant in – various diplomatic events: the Munich Security Conference, Globsec, the Arctic Circle Assembly, the Black Sea Security Forum in Odessa, the Warsaw Security Forum and a few Nato summits. (If any organisers of any similar wing-dings are reading, all invitations considered, etc.)

You could probably spend your entire year bouncing from one such beano to the next, draping your neck with sufficient laminates that standing upright becomes difficult by about August. There’s also the chance of being appointed defence minister of some minor Balkan republic by accident or as a result of a card game. Indeed, I suspect that there are people who do live like this or who wonder, as we bump into them in yet another queue for yet another buffet, whether Team Foreign Desk might actually be itinerant freeloaders.

The question that inevitably arises is whether any of this gabbing is doing much good. The Delphi Economic Forum in Greece, from where this dispatch is sent, seems as good a location as any to ponder this question – certainly, many trickier questions have been pondered just up the street at Ancient Delphi, where the cloak-clad sages of 20-odd centuries ago consulted the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo, otherwise known as the Delphic Oracle. For what it might be worth in the current context, she might have suggested to one impetuous and proverbially acquisitive ruler – the Lydian king Croesus – that picking a fight with Persia was a terrific idea, nothing could possibly go wrong and so forth: Croesus and the Lydians got duly stomped.

The obvious jokes and/or deft philosophical observations about the significance of the location of the Delphi Economic Forum have probably all been done, not least by this correspondent. The theme of this year’s event is “The Shock of the New”, to which it might be reasonably retorted that we, as a planet and a species, have possibly reached the point at which shocks are nothing new and the new is no longer shocking. Greece, for example, is presently contending with the fact that a decent chunk of its immense global shipping fleet is becalmed by a conflict between the US, Israel and Iran. On Wednesday, a Greek-owned, Liberia-flagged freighter, Epaminondas, was fired on in the Strait of Hormuz by an Iranian gunboat. 

For most non-US Western democracies, the set text of the foreseeable future is likely to remain the address given to the World Economic Forum in January by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney – the still-rippling impact of which is in itself something of an advertisement for events such as these. Carney’s speech was a call for co-operation among  the world’s middle powers in order to protect each other’s interests in the escalating absence of US leadership. Countries of roughly that rank are always well represented at Delphi. Speakers this year include Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Albanian prime minister Edi Rama, Prince Albert II of Monaco, and ministers from all over an Eastern Mediterranean/Balkan region that’s full of small to medium-sized countries with good reason to be nervous about any upsetting of the global order.

As one such leader told me on the first afternoon of this year’s Delphi Economic Forum, there is always value in turning up in person. “When you can look them in the eye,” says president Alar Karis of Estonia, “you get more confidence: are we dealing with the right people, the right person? So, this helps to continue, or to develop, a collaboration.” Great things can happen at an espresso station.

At the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh in 2023, I heard a government minister from an autocratic nation explain the pitfalls of democracy in an unstable world. “Democracy is great,” he said with a wry grin, “but in America every four years you are dealing with a completely different group of people, with different values and priorities.” Two and a half years later, with the US (and the world) in an even more chaotic state than it was then, it’s not difficult to see how his anti-democratic view could seem vindicated. 
 
Given the enfilade of apparently intractable problems arrayed against democratic leaders, you could imagine that many of them would prefer not to have to deal with a restive electorate or rancorous parliament. In the UK this week, prime minister Keir Starmer is once more facing calls to resign over his appointment of the now-disgraced Peter Mandelson as US ambassador. This is the latest in a series of crises that have plagued his premiership.

As UK voters tire of the never-ending political drama, commentators debate whether or not the country has become ungovernable. Of some comfort to the prime minister is the fact that he is not alone – the politics of many wealthy democracies seem more unstable now than they have been in living memory. On the streets of London, Paris and New York, people block out the sounds of their fellow citizens by plugging in to a favoured political podcast, whose producers profit by amping up the din. If, like me, your day is filled with such commentary, it’s easy to feel subsumed in the mire.

Inside and outside the podcast studios, there is a widespread belief that politicians seem incapable of tackling the issues that matter most to voters. Their ineptitude combined with our dissatisfaction does sound like rather a good recipe for ungovernability and might be why some polls have found a growing fondness for aspects of autocracy. So, is the problem that we are cursed with an exceptionally poor batch of leaders, that our standards are too high or simply that we have the wrong system of government? Well, a little bit of all three, compounded by the impact of technology.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that the most maddening and, therefore, dangerous thing about the internet is that it gives us the illusion of omniscience. Since all worldly information is seemingly at the tips of our fingers, then the solutions to all worldly ills must be too. And politicians, being ultimately the same as all the rest of us, believe this too. Their consequent infighting increases pressure on governments, which feeds into our sense of permacrisis. On top of this is another factor, particularly acute in the UK, that many of our present woes are rooted in economics that are inextricably tied to events happening elsewhere in the world and over which our leaders have little, if any, influence. 

So does this mean that our cacophonous disquiet is the result of too much technology mixed with democracy and that Keir Starmer is actually a good prime minister? No. The truth is that there aren’t simple or even definitive answers to many of the complex challenges facing modern societies. But if any country can ultimately deal with them (by no means a certainty), then it will be one that is capable of adaptation through reform, in which simple but crude solutions are not clamoured for and debate is free and open – ie, a democracy.  

Alexis Self is Monocle’s foreign editor. For more opinion, analysis and insight, subscribe to Monocle today.

As well as our annual Design Awards, the magazine in your hands includes a celebration of watchmaking and the value of timekeeping. So perhaps it’s strange that two of my favourite reports are a tale about a train that fails to depart on schedule and a dispatch from a city neighbourhood where time has, until now, refused to tick along in accordance with the beat of the age.

Let’s start with that rail trip that runs across our Expo pages. Ann Marie Gardner was Monocle’s Americas bureau chief when this title launched in 2007 and I’m pleased to say that, even after she exited from the masthead, she has stayed part of the family. Over the years, Gardner has generously undertaken some gruelling and long reporting trips for Monocle, including jumping aboard a mail ship as it dropped of its parcels at various Atlantic island outposts. When it was suggested that we should send a writer on a two-day train ride north from Winnipeg to the Hudson Bay town of Churchill, in the depths of winter, I knew just who to call.

Churchill is so remote that it cannot be reached by car, only by plane or train. But who would choose the slow option? And what would unfold if you jumped aboard and headed to the polar-bear capital of the High North? Gardner, along with photographer Jesse Chehak, was game to answer these questions and more. Now, I admit that I did feel a little guilty when she sent me a message from the Via Rail train containing pictures of her utilitarian green cabin and describing the train’s very late departure and sluggish progress across the flat frozen landscape. But the story she got is a gem. It’s a report that takes you to the heart of Canada – and Canadians – but it is also a rumination on the pleasures that come from allowing time to pass slowly and giving up on watching the clock.

The other story in this issue where time is of the essence is set in downtown Cairo and has been reported by Mary Fitzgerald and photographed by Rena Efendi. The duo look at how this sleepy, unkempt, timeworn neighbourhood is being revived – but will its magical shops, cafés and apartments, which have until now ignored the calls of modernity, be erased or spoilt?

And then there are the watches and the people who wear them. It’s not hard to know the precise time of day – it’s there on your laptop screen as you type and staring back at you when you glance at your phone. So why do so many men and women choose to wear a wristwatch, a ticking mechanical contraption, instead of allowing their electronic devices to keep them on schedule? I count myself among this cohort of watch wearers and, for me, it’s simple. I want time to have meaning and the seconds to slip away with some grace.

I have two nice watches – I know. The first was bought with some money left to me by my parents; the second was a gift that marked a special anniversary. I wear them on alternate days and whenever I snap the metal bracelets tight on my wrist, I think, without fail, either of two people who I miss or a job that has made me who I am. It got me wondering about why others do the same so I asked our associate editor, Grace Charlton, to speak to people – including a chef, a photographer, an ambassador and a fashion designer – about the watch that accompanies them throughout their day and also about what time means to them. She has produced a report about watches, yes, but also about how we all judge time in very diferent ways.

Finally, there are the dogs: the watch dogs. This was the idea of our creative director, Richard Spencer Powell, and runs on our fashion pages. It’s a delight and simply features wonderful dogs and great timepieces. My favourite aside was when Rich told me that the team had taken great efforts to ensure that each hound was matched with a watch that echoed its style and demeanour. You can be the judge on their canine and chronometer matching abilities. As always, feel free to send me ideas, thoughts or just the time of day at at@monocle.com.