The only authorized history of Bulgari watchmaking “Beyond Time” will be published in September 2023. This marks a first for the Manufacture, celebrating more than 100 years of Roman-inspired watchmaking creativity.
Beyond Time summarises a century of watchmaking savoir-faire: it is the total of all Bulgari has ever achieved in the domain of horology since the 1920s. An authoritative reference work on the brand’s singular “Horologic-Roman” and jewelry-inspired creativity, it is the product of years of research, authored by the company’s greatest specialists and featuring hundreds of original, captivating illustrations.
More than watches
The book, published by Assouline, will be available in September 2023. It opens a far-reaching panorama on the watchmaking artistry of the Maison that became a Manufacture. It weaves the past with the present, heritage with innovation, and, in its final chapter, looks ahead to technologies that will, in time, enhance the reality and experience of horology.
It engages in conversations between the brand’s collections with cinema directors, athletes, experts, and conductors. A Bulgari watch is, by nature, many things. It is Serpenti; it is Bulgari Bulgari; it is Octo; it is Grande Complication. It is both high watchmaking and high jewelry. Unpredictable, impertinent, combining Italian flair with Swiss watchmaking mastery, ‘the Bulgari watch’ is not easily captured.
High-level insights
With eight world records set by the Octo Finissimo, who better to sit down with than Carl Lewis, one of the greatest sprinters of all time and winner of 9 Olympic medals? A particular life philosophy, the relentless training, the will to surpass oneself, setting one record after another: when it comes to ‘high level,’ the trajectories of Carl Lewis and Bulgari converge towards the same degree of perfection.
Rahul Kadakia, famed auctioneer and international director of Christie’s jewelry department, offers an interesting perspective. He has sold some of the world’s most important jewelry creations, including many of the personal pieces that belonged to Elizabeth Taylor, a Bulgari icon and close friend of the brand.
Prestigious contributors
Maestro Lorenzo Viotti connects conducting an orchestra and a Manufacture; the artist Marina Abramović reminds us of the millennia-old analogy between the Serpenti collection and the animal.
Ultimately, the 35 cm, 300-page work, published in English by Assouline, become the cornerstone upon which almost 100 years of Swiss-Italian watchmaking history rests upon which a future no less daring and iconoclastic may be built.
