Dear Willy, It is hard to find definitive information about clocks which show Italian hours. A number survive in Italy mostly in the Rome area. What I write now should not be taken as wholly reliable!
Napoleon wanted French time everywhere of course and most Italian hours clocks were changed during his era. Papal influence in the Rome area meant that a few Italian hours clocks escaped Napoleon's attention! The date given for the Paolo Uccello clock is 1443 and you can be fairly sure that such a clock would be a very poor timekeeper compared with clocks today. The typical daily error would greatly exceed the difference in time of sunset from one day to the next so there would be no need for any special mechanism. Clocks of that period would have to be reset frequently, using a sundial of course, and you could choose to set it to Italian hours or French hours as you wished. Of course, the clock weights were probably wound daily anyway (and in early clocks the winding process stopped power to the clock thereby contributing further to the errors) so the added task of resetting the clock was hardly a great one. As clock time-keeping improved, the daily error reduced and, by the Napoleonic era, the effort of resetting an Italian hours clock daily would have started to seem a little irksome. I believe some of these later clocks (18th century) did have special mechanisms but they were pretty crude. I can imagine clock-keepers being quite grateful to Napoleon! There is an interesting paper by Nicola Severino on Italian hours clocks: `Le Ore Italiche... Perdute!' Also, have a look at his web page... http://www.nicolaseverino.it/orologio%20italiano.htm You will some pictures of Italian hours clocks (I took a couple of them myself). The majority of these clocks have dials running I, II, III, IIII, V and VI. The single hand turns about four times a day if you are lucky. I don't know of ANY that remotely keep to Italian hours time today and most are in a very poor state of preservation. Frank H. King Cambridge, U.K. -
