Lotto Squadra Men’s Tennis T-Shirt
About Aydın
This provincial capital lies in the Büyük Menderes valley, near the site of ancient Tralles. The surrounding plain has long been used for figs, olives, and cotton, and the modern city developed as a rail and administrative center between İzmir and the inland Aegean towns.
THE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
A men’s tennis t-shirt from Lotto, the Italian sports house that has been making football and tennis kit since 1973.
Squadra is Italian for team, and the name is exactly as plain as it sounds — this is the team-line tee rather than a signature or tournament piece.
A tennis tee is the most exposed garment in the sport, because there is nothing in it to hide behind. No collar to give it shape, no placket, no panelled construction and no branding architecture — it is a knitted body with sleeves, and either it fits, moves and sheds moisture or it does not, and a player finds out inside twenty minutes.
That is why the team-line tee is the piece that says most about a manufacturer: it is the garment with the fewest features to distract from how the cloth and the pattern were cut.
Aydın sits inland on the Büyük Menderes plain in western Turkey, in flat agricultural country where summer heat is sustained and shade is scarce away from the town — the conditions in which a light knit tee is the practical choice over a heavier collared shirt.
Specifications
| Type | Men's tennis t-shirt |
|---|---|
| Line | Squadra (team) |
| Brand | Lotto |
| Manufacturer since | 1973 |
Lotto’s tennis kit has been on court for fifty years without ever being the loudest thing on it, and the Squadra line is where that shows most plainly: a plain tee, named for what it is, in the range a club buys by the dozen rather than the one a player buys for a final.
LET Lotto Squadra Men’s Tennis T-Shirt SHOW YOU Aydın
Shirt: Fine, Tralleis is no Ephesus—I’d bring a smaller trumpet for the ruins—but those Üçgöz arches, surviving from the ancient city’s Roman bath-gymnasium complex, frame a tennis shirt better than Ephesus ever framed my backhand.
Shirt: Bursa has the grander mosque résumé, obviously, and never shuts up about it; still, Aydın’s Cihanoğlu Mosque is an 18th-century Ottoman mosque noted for painted decoration, so it wins the color match while I pretend not to notice.
Shirt: Istanbul’s bazaars would call this a warm-up lap, and they’d be insufferable about it; annoyingly, the Ottoman Nasuh Paşa Complex sits right by Aydın’s old bazaar, getting mosque, history, and shopping temptation into one neat little ambush.
Shirt: Manisa will brag about grapes until the vines ask for silence; unfortunately for my pride, Aydın wins the fig argument, because the Büyük Menderes plain is one of Turkey’s major fig-growing areas and even the orchards look well-conditioned.
Jackson Phillips here. Owner of TTT. We are working hard every day to bring you the most useful product reviews in the business. Our goal is putting the right product in every hand. If you have time, shoot me an email at jacksonphillips@thetennistactician.com and tell me exactly what you think of your purchase. The more feedback we get, the better we can serve. Thank you for your patronage. And Burn, Laugh, and Learn.