Collectors have always played a decisive role in creating museum collections. The Italian Hours exhibition, curated by Antonio Lenner and Giorgio Strano, underlines this often underestimated fact, presenting to the public a selection of Italian clocks traced, preserved and studied by Gian Carlo Del Vecchio (1918-2016). In sixty years of uninterrupted activity, this great collector has built up a specialist collection that has nothing to envy of similar ones in the major museums of the world.

The sixty masterpieces on display, all original, created from the 15th to the beginning of the 19th century, constitute an extremely significant selection from the entire collection, which numbers over three hundred examples. To better define the context of time measurement in Italy, the exhibition also includes some tools for knowing the time designed before the spread of the mechanical clock. Also on display are the tools used by master watchmakers to create their masterpieces.

The historic clocks selected - table, wall, tower - are not only beautiful and significant from the production of some of the most renowned Italian makers. On the one hand they testify to the human obsession with measuring and controlling time, in the ephemeral attempt to dominate it; a desire sometimes stigmatized by the decorations on the cases and dials of the watches. On the other hand, some specimens on display tell their own stories, which complement the more general story of technological progress. An example of this is the "nocturnes" of the Campani brothers, designed in the heart of Baroque Rome to fulfill the papal desire to know the time without having to light a candle every time and, above all, without those annoying ticking noises that disturb sleep.