There is a particular kind of silence in the Parmigiani workshop at Fleurier, and I say that having been in a fair number of workshops where the silence is performed for the benefit of visitors. This one is different. It's the silence of people who do not feel watched. The radio, somewhere, is playing a French talkback program about cheese. A woman at the second bench is eating an apple with complete concentration. On her loupe stand is a movement the size of a five-cent piece, and in front of her — not yet cased, not yet signed — is the watch I have come to see.
The La Ravenale is, on paper, a small thing. Thirty-eight and a half millimetres across, seven and a bit thick, a three-hand automatic with a date at six. By the blunt metrics of contemporary watch marketing it is almost aggressively unremarkable. There is no tourbillon, no minute repeater, no retrograde anything. The press folder gives me a reference — Ref. PFC915-1020001-HA3141 — and a calibre — PF 517, running at 28,800 vph, with a sixty-hour reserve — and the distinct feeling that Parmigiani's communications team would prefer I not write about any of it in those terms.
They would rather I write about the dial.
Reader, I will write about the dial.
The La Ravenale is a métiers d'art piece built as a quiet tribute to Michel Parmigiani, the company's founder, who turned eighty in February and who still — I am told with some pride and some exasperation — walks into the restoration atelier three or four days a week. Before there was a maison, there was a restorer in a narrow first-floor workshop in Couvet who, over the course of the 1980s, repaired a quantity of pre-industrial horology that would not be believed if you tried to list it.
I went in sceptical. The category of "founder tribute watch" is, in 2026, thoroughly debased; it usually means a logo moved two millimetres and a limited edition of two hundred. I had to live with it for two weeks before I understood.
It is a watch that refuses to perform, and in refusing to perform, does something almost none of its peers can manage.
Here is what I did not see at the preview: the way the enamel catches afternoon light and loses it again in the space of a turn of the wrist. The way the second hand — pale blue, almost lilac, tempered in-house — actually jumps, just slightly, on the beat. The way the crown is just undersized enough to disappear under a shirt cuff but just large enough that a fingernail can find it in the dark. These are not features. They are the accumulated residue of a restorer's instincts, applied to a new object.
What the movement is, and is not
The calibre deserves a paragraph of its own, though Parmigiani would rather it didn't. The PF 517 is not new. It is a considered refinement of the PF 331, itself derived from a Vaucher base that Parmigiani has used, in various forms, since the mid-2000s. The finishing is the point. The bridges are angled by hand; the bevels are polished with a boxwood pegwood and diamantine. None of this would matter if the watch were not built to be opened, worn for forty years, opened again.
Against which: the platinum case is, to me, a mistake. The La Ravenale is a watch that wants, almost aches, to be made in steel. Steel is what restorers wear. Steel is what survives.
On wearing it
On the wrist it is light for its metal, and it disappears. This is not a compliment every watch wants. A Submariner does not want to disappear; an A. Lange Datograph is designed to be noticed. The La Ravenale is doing the opposite work.
Near the end of my second week with the watch, I took it to a friend who repairs clocks in an inner-north Melbourne arcade and does not follow the watch press at all. He held it for a long time, turned it over, put the loupe on the dial, and said: "whoever did this liked doing it." That is, I think, the review.