What makes Pesariis tick? The Italian town where clocks rule

Under a brilliant blue sky in the hamlet of Pesariis, birds twitter in unison with church bells, cows graze in verdant pastures and stone chalets line the streets. It looks like a scene from the Swiss highlands.

But Pesariis is an Italian village, one of seven in the Pesarina Valley in the Carnia region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in northeastern Italy. The locals speak Friulian, a dialect dating to the 11th century and everywhere you look, you see clocks. I mean, everywhere… in a restored merchant’s home that’s now a museum, in restaurants, bars, and all over the streets.

More than half the residents carry the surname of Solari, a name first recorded in the 15th century—including my husband’s. The Solaris invented flap clocks and the technology behind airport departure boards; today, Solari supply timepieces for NASA. Yet despite this rich cultural heritage, Pesariis only sees between 10,000 to 12,000 visitors a year.

Even my husband Kim Hewett, whose mother Ermes Solari was born in Pesariis, knew nothing about his family’s clockmaking history until he visited in 1985. “I was totally surprised to learn about it because none of my relatives in Australia even talked about it,” he tells me.

When he knocked on the door of the family home, built by Kim’s nonno (grandfather) Giacomo Solari and his brothers Bruno and Luino, Bruno’s wife Maria answered. Kim remembers her face registered shock, “but the hint of recognition as well.” It turned out the letter his mother had written never arrived.

“Many times, people asked me, why was a watchmaking company born in an Alpine village, away from the city, at 750 meters above sea level, with bad communication (and bad) roads, with very long winter months and few inhabitants?”

- Alceo Solari, eighth-generation watchmaker

When Kim turned up with me 20 years later, our visit was equally unexpected. Slovenian friends drove us over from Lake Bled and our route crawled up, down and around into Italy. When Pesariis finally came into view, with the sheer cliffs and vertical walls of the Dolomites as the backdrop, it looked like a toy village.

Even close-up, human perspective abruptly dissolved as sudden views of gleaming white crags towering overhead caused light and darkness to flicker like a zoetrope in the gaps between the buildings.

It was through Annalisa Cleava, a local culture specialist who works in the tourist office, that I met Alceo Solari. He’s an eighth-generation watchmaker employed by the Solari company for almost 20 years who has long been intrigued by the town’s history.

“Many times, people asked me, why was a watchmaking company born in an Alpine village, away from the city, at 750 meters above sea level, with bad communication {and bad} roads, with very long winter months and few inhabitants?” He made it his mission to find out. According to Cleava, “There aren’t historians who have studied the Pesarina Valley specifically.” Alceo is widely acknowledged as the Pesariis expert.

Legend has it a pirate from the Republic of Genoa was exiled to Carnia as a political prisoner—and coincidentally knew how to make clocks. Another story identifies him as a Venetian spy or possibly a tax collector. Alceo found no proof of any such clock-making stranger: “Many documents about the history of Fratelli Solari were lost and burned during the Cossack occupation of 1944-45,” he tells me. “It’s natural that lacking the sources, myths that tell a fascinating story about pirates are born.”

He did, however, find accounts of people from Carnia acquiring watchmaking skills in Germany as early as the 16th century. These Carnic merchants, Cramars, trekked across the snowbound Dolomite peaks carrying goods bought in Venice to sell in the Danube region of the Hapsburg Empire.

In the second half of the 17th century, a family called Cappellari started building large bell tower clocks and Pesarino clocks, domestic pendulum wall clocks. In 1725, a factory was built next to the river in Pesariis, then comprising of 40 families, most bearing the surnames Gonano, Solari and Cappellari. Initially, Cappellari was associated with horology, but the name changed to Solari when Giacomo Solari married Maria Cappellari in 1731.

Kim and I arrived in August, just before the Feast of the Assumption when Pesariis was busy with people coming to pay their respects to relatives, both living and dead. We too visited the cemetery to look for the grave of Kim’s uncle Nino, who Kim strongly resembled as a child. An older woman spoke to Kim and began to cry when she realized who he was. Kim’s grandmother Elena Solari had been her childhood friend—she’d not seen her since Elena left for Australia in the late 1920s.

“As a kid in Australia, he [Kim] remembers his nonno (grandfather) standing at the gate, “finger pointed to his fob watch on his coat telling me I was late for dinner.” At the time, Kim thought it a quirk of character, but he has a different perspective now.

We stayed the night and the next day, Kim’s birthday, he rang his mom in Australia. “Guess what? I’m sitting on the very bed where you were born.” Kim remembers how “mom was speechless at first, and then she got really emotional. When she wished me happy birthday, I could hear a tear in her voice. I felt elated that I could do this.”

After lunch with newfound family Maria, her son Carlo Solari, his wife Patrizia and their son Nicola, we followed the Percorso dell’Orologeria Monumentale, the Monumental Clock-Making Route through the village. Annalisa told me there are “… 15 clocks. Sundials, carillon, water clocks … a clock for planets,” all made by retired Solari employees. Each one demonstrates the diverse instruments and methods used to measure time over the centuries.

Later that day, I stood with one foot on either side of the analemmatic (horizontal) sundial. This type of sundial has the months of the year marked on a central panel set into the ground so I aligned my feet with August, and my body performed the function of the gnomon, the triangular blade or stick that usually casts the shadow. I looked at the arc-shaped hour marker ellipse to see where mine ended and discovered it was 100 percent accurate (although it doesn’t take daylight savings into account).

Outside the church, the carillon of sparkling bells trilled the hours. In the Museo dell’Orologeria Pesarina in the former Customs House, Annalisa told me when “the municipality acquired the pieces a group of Val Pesarina enthusiasts had collected years earlier”, the oldest clock dates to 1400CE. The local horologists had accumulated a significant number of different types of clocks between them, ranging right up to models from the 20th century.

Even Agriturismo Sot La Napa where we stopped for a drink was clock central. Clocks with hand-painted faces decorated walls and 18th-century timepieces made of iron stood on tall wooden stands hung with concrete bollards for weights. A row of bottles containing fruit liqueurs such as myrtle, lamponi (raspberry) and ruta (grape), each one a different shape, lined a high shelf in the room. Later, we sat outside in the piazza and listened to a band perform Beatle covers in Friulian.

Cleava, herself one of the 150 or so residents of Pesariis, confirmed around 30 still work in the original factory where a clock was invented in the 1930s, in the form of a chessboard panel with two-meter-high numbers. Each digit is composed of 15 flaps turned over by a camshaft. A deceptively simple invention, the flap clock was actually the forerunner of LED displays.

In 1950, this mechanism was further refined, Alceo Solari tells me, “with numbers, hours and minutes printed on rotating levels which open[ed] up like the pages of a book.” Later models included calendars and factored in leap years using a mechanical memory, paving the way he says, for ‘clocks with no hands’ and domestic clocks such as the Cifre 3.  This small table clock was designed by architect and artist Gino Valle in collaboration with the Solaris in 1966, and patented by Remigio Solari, the creator of the dot matrix clock. New York’s MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) hailed the Cifre 3 as a piece of art and displays one in their permanent collection.

Visiting Pesariis has given my husband a renewed sense of connection with his family. “As a kid in Australia, he remembers his nonno (grandfather) standing at the gate, “finger pointed to his fob watch on his coat telling me I was late for dinner.” At the time, Kim thought it was a quirk of character, but he has a different perspective now. “I was swelling with pride because they hadn’t made some small discovery,” he tells me. “They’d actually been pioneers in clock-making.”

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