Does time exist or is it just space by a different name? What kind of watch is most like Dante, the Florentine poet who wrote the Divine Comedy? These are not the questions that usually get directed at chief executives of luxury brands but Angelo Bonati, who heads the Italian watchmaker Officine Panerai, is no ordinary businessman.
'When you first get a watch, as a child, you hear the 'tick-tock' and you try to imagine how it works,' he says, his eyes shining and intense as he sips an espresso in Hong Kong's Four Seasons Hotel. 'It keeps going. Alone. Just like you. And maybe you think that this machine is like you and you wonder about its soul, its spirit. As you grow old you forget about this moment, but the essence of this feeling persists. And that's why we love our watches.'
Eureka. Just like that. Just like Aeschylus, as the tortoise fell on his head, time spent with Bonati is surreal and illuminating at the same time. And all the while he wears a wicked smile, the kind of dangerous sorriso that has made Florence, this Milanese's adopted home, a dangerous and beguiling city ever since Catherine de Medici began beaming on the city 500 years ago.
'Florence gave us the culture of beauty,' says Bonati. 'When you work in Florence you can feel that. Like the Duomo [Florence's 13th Century basilica]. We aim to get all the elements of Florence into our watches, the city is part of Panerai's DNA.'
It's thus not surprising that Panerai's new venture in Beijing is not just another champagne-drenched identity parade for the usual celebrity suspects. That's not Bonati's style. Instead the watch company is the co-host, along with Florence's Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, of an historic exhibition at Beijing's Planetarium that features the pioneering scientific work of Galileo Galilei, the first scientist to prove that the Earth moved around the sun, and not vice-versa.
The exhibition, titled 'Galileo's Telescope - the Instrument that Changed the World' runs until January 10, 2009. It coincides with the 500th anniversary of the telescope's invention in 1609 and the commencement, on January 1, 2009, of Unesco's World Year of Astronomy.
