Geneva Watch Days 2024: Bvlgari Composes A Horological Symphony With A Trio Of Musical Watches

What do the world of watches have in common with the musical realm? If you are a lover of watches, you might be aware of the watch complication chiming watches. But did you ever think that a Roman jeweller would someday take this complicated mechanism and create a exceptional watch using this very technology? That’s one too many complications for a single manufacturer and yet, Bvlgari makes it look like a piece of cake.

 At Geneva Watch Days 2024, the Maison launched the Octo Roma Grande Sonnerie Tourbillon and Octo Roma Carillon Tourbillon which reinvented Bvlgari’s soundscapes. The musicality of these chiming watches is based on a new musical interval that challenges the canon: the tritone harmonic interval. Applying this unprecedented dissonance in acoustic watches gives them a unique tonal quality. As a brand rooted in Roman culture, in antiquity but also its Baroque period, Bvlgari ventures into a realm that, while not bound by the conventions of musical harmony, forms an integral part of classical music.

Adding harmonic complexity to its comprehensive range of chiming timepieces. Whether they chime on two, three, or four gongs, repeat the minutes, or automatically ring the hours, the new Octo Roma watches play tritone intervals, created by Bvlgari in collaboration with the Italian- Swiss conductor Lorenzo Viotti.

Bvlgari’s polyphonic mastery shines through in the recital-worthy mechanical ensembles housed in the iconic Octo Roma case, the reference for Bvlgari’s grand complications. Complementing the two aforementioned chiming timepieces, Bvlgari reintroduces the Octo Finissimo Minute Repeater in full carbon, a high-tech musical instrument that holds the record as the thinnest chiming watch ever created. The theme of this new opus is the tritone, an interval with a notorious role in music history, also known as the augmented fourth or the diminished fifth. This creative and disruptive take on the tonal scale is the result of the collaboration between Bvlgari and conductor Lorenzo Viotti.

Serpenti Pallini

With dazzling suppleness, the double-coil Serpenti Pallini wraps around the wrist with a gentle embrace. Its daring design, inspired by the historical Pallini of 1955, evokes the skin of an exotic serpent. Now animated for the first time by the Piccolissimo movement, the irresistible Serpenti Pallini is more charismatic than ever. A marvel of miniaturization created by Bvlgari’s Manufacture in Le Sentier, Switzerland, this calibre is one of the world’s smallest ever – indeed, it is currently the smallest round mechanical movement on the market. Its minute dimensions allowed Bvlgari to revisit the lines of Serpenti Pallini, and slightly resize the serpent’s head and tail to achieve perfect proportional balance.

The Piccolissimo’s extraordinary mechanics only enhance the charms of Serpenti Pallini, creating multiple ways to wear it. Easily removable, the calibre can also be rotated by half a turn to adapting the dial’s reading direction for the precious dial – with a diamond-set bezel or fully paved with diamonds. Serpenti Pallini unveils its three new jewelled metamorphoses: diamond-set in white gold; white gold and rose gold; and white gold and yellow gold. This marks the first contemporary interpretation of Serpenti Pallini in yellow gold, whose solar brilliance returns to the forefront, instilling a deliciously vintage style to the jewelled reptile.