The Octo has become a mainstay in the watch collections of Bvlgari, a house known far and wide for its daring and fine-jewellery expertise. The iconic line is expanding significantly this year, with several new additions. Among them, A watchmaking tour de force: the Octo Finissimo Tourbillon, the thinnest ever made, introduced at Baselworld a few days ago with Eric Bana, ambassador of the brand.
Every facet of the Octo watch points the way to the dials’ extremely refined features, created by the same pursuit of simplicity and flawlessness wrought through generations of fine workmanship and sophistication.
The tourbillon improves the accuracy of mechanical watches by offsetting perturbations caused by the earth’s gravity in the balance wheel’s isochronism. Delicately made and protected by its cage, the tourbillon defies gravity with its rotations, which are as finely tuned as a high-performance racing engine and as poetic as a beating heart.
This house movement is thinner than a Swiss five-franc coin, and right from the start, its design had to incorporate several solutions to reduce the overall thickness. The starting point was the tourbillon cage, a decisive factor in the construction process. It is 1.95 mm thick, a fact that shaped the rest of the structure. Once incorporated into the plate, the cage determined the thickness of the entire movement. The overall architecture also includes two bridges, one for the minute wheel and the other for the gear train of the tourbillon cage, which rotates once a minute.
Without
exaggerating the achievement, the Octo Finissimo Tourbillon represents a big step forward in
the ongoing quest for thin watch complications. Simply wonderful !