Locman XXIV Canto 40mm 0LO4T31R-00PKKGPK

Dante's poem, besides being a powerful and visionary tale of a journey to the afterlife, is also universally recognized as a highly detailed portrait of the customs and culture of the fourteenth century.

And within this majestic painting, there are significant references to the existence of mechanical clocks in Tuscany since then, confirming that Italy is certainly a country with ancient watchmaking traditions. It's still difficult to determine exactly when the first timepiece saw the light of day, but the Divine Comedy is the first mention of gears, wheels, and spheres. In Canto Twenty-four of Paradise, Dante compares the dance of the souls of the blessed to the movement of the gears of a mechanical clock.

The blessed – he writes – move at different speeds, like the hands of a clock, one of which seems stationary and the other is much slower: those souls showed the degree of joy based on their rapidity or slowness of movement.