If the word “innovation” is associated with the city of Florence at all, it is usually with times long gone. The city’s past glories loom so large over it that we are automatically surprised when we learn about more recent examples of innovation in the Tuscan capital. Such is the case with the stunning example of rationalism that is the Santa Maria Novella train station and, in particular, since railways have been at the center of time-keeping innovation since the invention of railway time, with the triangular clock outside the main entrance, the first public digital clock in Italy and, perhaps, the world.
Santa Maria Novella was designed by the Gruppo Toscano, a group of architects led by Giovanni Michelucci, an established professor and famed designer of Ponte alle Grazie and the church on the Autostrada del Sole. The rest of the circle consisted of grad students, all of whom were in their twenties, including Italo Gamberini and Nello Baroni. The cutting-edge rationalist project clashed with the architectural ideas of the fascist regime. It is said that Mussolini had to be convinced by his Jewish mistress Margherita Sarfatti that, when seen from above, the station looked like a lictorian fasces, the symbol of his fascist movement. Sources vary on whether this was a coincidence or purposefully done, whether as a ploy to endear the project to Il Duce or otherwise, but the project went ahead, with outrage from conservative naysayers and enthusiasm from the young intellectuals who frequented Caffè Le Giubbe Rosse.
An early project from 1933 shows the outside of the fabbricato viaggiatori with a regular analog clock. The 25-year-old Nello Baroni, the member of Gruppo Toscano most interested in design and engineering, is credited with the clock that actually ended up there, inspired by recent revolutions in watchmaking, such as Josef Pallweber’s 1883 jump-hour pocket watch, which told the time through rotating disks, or the Ansonia Clock Company’s Plato Clock, first shown at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. The latter was a cylindrical object that displayed the time through flipping digital cards, much like Baroni’s clock.
Solari di Udine, a company that had been active since 1725 and is still in business today, was commissioned to construct the clock. A bifacial pyramidical object, it was placed by the main entrance a bandiera (flag-like), so as to be visible from two sides. The numbers were written in DIN 1451, a font that had been standardized in Germany just a few years earlier in 1931 and is widely used in road signs there to this day. The technological innovation was that the flaps on Baroni’s clock rotated electronically, rather than mechanically, and were synchronized with other, similar flip clocks around the station, also made by Solari di Udine, though it is rumored that these were intentionally late by a minute or two. These other flip clocks were themselves synchronized with the system of flip boards showing arrivals and departures, a system that was replaced by LED panels in the early 2000s. This, unfortunately, decommissioned the ticket office clocks, and no one has bothered to find a proper solution since, besides covering the static numbers with cardboard.
The Gruppo Toscano would only collaborate on the train station, dissolving just after its completion, and Nello Baroni would go on to have a distinguished career, completing a number of projects in Florence and Italy, such as the new Ponte alla Vittoria (with fellow Gruppo Toscano member, Italo Gamberini), the Teatro Verdi and a number of cinemas. After World War II, the flaps on the clock were changed from black numerals on a white background to white numerals on a black background.
Solari di Udine retained the patent for the clock. Inspired by having developed Baroni’s clock and with the help of designer Gino Valle, they first revolutionized public signage in Italy and the world before applying their know-how to the table clock industry in 1956 with the Cifra 5, which used the same mechanism and had a very similar look, yet was adapted for home use. They refined the mechanism and design further in 1965 with the sleek Cifra 3, a design masterpiece that is now on permanent display in the Humble Masterpieces exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as at the Science Museum in London. It is regarded as the holy grail for flip-clock enthusiasts (who call the study of flip clocks “horopalettology” in honor of the Italian orologio a palette), and a revamped version was put back on the market a few years ago. The Cifra 3 is the culmination of the genius of Baroni’s watch.
An aside…
We Florentines, with our usual hyperbole and pride, like to insist that the Baroni Clock is the world’s first digital clock. This doesn’t really seem to be the case as there are plenty of worthy contenders, and what a digital clock actually is is not entirely clear. However, the clock outside Santa Maria Novella is undoubtedly the first public digital clock in Italy, or maybe even the world. It was a cutting-edge design for the time that inspired a revolution in watch-making.
