Locman XXIV Canto Mechanical Chrono 0LO5T31R-00PKKGB0

Twenty-fourth Canto
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 in this majestic painting there are significant references to the existence of mechanical clocks in Tuscany since then, thus confirming that Italy is certainly a country with ancient watchmaking traditions.

Even today it is difficult to establish exactly when the first timepiece saw the light, but in the Divine Comedy there is a reference for the first time to 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.