Fo o d , Hi st or y & Cultu re
Pesariis The Country of Watches di Angélique Gagliolo
Nestled in the Carnic Alps there is a small and charming village known as the country of watches. It is Pesariis, located in Val Pesarina, in the municipality of Prato Carnico in the province of Udine. EN
The small village is a real architectural jewel, thanks to its narrow streets and typical houses of the early ‘600, very well preserved. The name Pesariis seems to derive from the toponym “in villa de Pesargis” which in turn derives from the weighbridge of the customs, to which the merchandise passing through the nearby Lavardet pass was subject, link between Carnia and Cadore Walking in Pesariis is like taking a journey through time and returning to how you lived in a peasant village (recently the old wash house was renovated, where women once went to wash the laundry), all at the rhythm of the ticking of watches. For the narrow streets of Pesariis, in fact, there are monumental reproductions of original watches: the carillon clock, which uses bells capable of matching the 118
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musical notes and reproduces completed musical pieces (the Ave Maria at 12.00 is not to be missed); the water turbine clock; the water-based one with tilting vessels; the clock of the planets; the checkerboard clock; the clock with water tanks, which thanks to a predefined flow of water fills every single tank in an hour, and then goes on to the next, until the twelve tanks are filled, which finally, with a mechanism, are empty them all at once, and then resume the slow filling; the giant vane clock; the giant perpetual calendar clock; and finally the planisphere and nocturnal clock, which serves to read the time of night, and indicates the stars that are in the sky at that time. If this visit to the open air were not enough, you can enter the Pesaro Watchmaking Exhibition which collects the centuries-old testimony of the artisan tradition of watches in Pesariis. The collection, which boasts elements of all kinds, is cataloged by technological phase.