Belotti on Via Nassa

A concours is decided by looking. Everything else about it is preparation. The judges walk the field and look, the crowd stands at the rope and looks, and the difference between a first and a third can be a panel gap seen from the right angle in the right light. It is an event built entirely on the eye.

Which makes it fitting that on the Friday afternoon of Lugano Elegance 2026, as the cars came down Via Nassa, the people waiting for them worked in optics.

Belotti, or BELOTTI OtticaUdito to give it its full name, has its Lugano shop at Via Nassa 19, on the arcaded street that runs through the middle of the old town. The company works in eyewear and in hearing, with centres across Ticino including Lugano and Bellinzona, and the Via Nassa address is one of its more recent openings. It sits directly on the route.

When the parade came through, the Belotti staff were outside the shop, under the arcade, with a gift bag for every participant. Not left on a table to be collected. Handed over, in person, by people standing on the street where their business is.

Inside each bag was a voucher and a full glasses cleaning kit.

That second item deserves a word, because it is the kind of small, unglamorous gift that turns out to be exactly right. Consider what a participant at this event actually does with a day. They sit in an open or half open car for several hours. They wear sunglasses, take them off in tunnels, put them back on at the lake, and in Ticino in May they do this ten or twelve times before lunch. They pick up dust from the road, salt from the

water and marks from their own hands every time they adjust a mirror. By the evening, most of them are looking at the world through a smeared lens and have stopped noticing.

A cleaning kit is not a luxury gift. It is a gift that gets used the following morning.

Via Nassa is worth understanding as a location in its own right. It is Lugano’s main shopping street, arcaded on both sides, closed to most traffic, running between the lake end of the old town and Piazza Riforma. During Lugano Elegance it becomes one of the event’s stages rather than one of its backdrops. Cars come down it. People stand under the arcades. The shops are open, their staff are outside, and for a few hours the commercial street and the event are the same thing.

That is the part of the Belotti partnership that mattered most. A sponsor logo on a board tells a participant that a company paid. A member of staff standing on the pavement outside their own shop, handing something over, tells them that a business in this city is glad they came.

A welcome gift is a small gesture. It is also the first thing a participant is handed after a long day on the road, which is a good reason to get it right.