I’m often asked about the watches I have in my collection, and so one of the things I decided I would do now my website has a blog is to feature some of my watches from time to time. In this post I want to talk about the Ennebi Fondale – a watch born out of Panerai’s history, and one of my absolute favourites.
First, a little background info. When Panerai was bought by Richemont (or the Vendome Group, as they were then) in 1998, many of the Panerai employees did not go to Switzerland when the company re-located. Alessandro Bettarini, for a long time the chief designer at Panerai, was one of those that remained in Florence. He began discussions with long time friend Luciano Nincheri, who he had first met in the 1970s when they were both working for Alessandro’s father, about the possibility of forming a company that would build “wrist devices to measure time and for navigation” and keep alive the Florentine tradition lost with the sale of the Panerai brand. Alessandro also discussed this proposal with others who had left Panerai “because their collaboration would have given more importance to the continuity with the past”, but after a few years nothing had come of this.
In February 2004 however Ennebi was formed (the name coming from the first letters of the founders surnames – NB). The purpose had changed slightly however – “we did not want anymore to point out the continuity with the Florentine company tradition I had worked with. Our products should have made the grade on their own. We wanted to underline the Italian, and in particular, the Tuscan origins of the products and we would have used as much as possible the collaborations with Italian companies, at all costs.” The Fondale, the first Ennebi watch, was released just 6 months later, and was based on a protoype Alessandro had built for Panerai in the 1980’s.
I contacted Alessandro in January 2010 and discussed with him the possibility of having a Fondale built. I had been told that there were many options that could be specified, but I wasn’t expecting the level of customisation that I was told was possible. At the time I spoke with him there were several cases for example – one in steel, the others in Grade 5 titanium (this is actually an alloy of 90% Ti with 6% aluminium & 4% vanadium. This gives a far higher tensile strength & heat resistance than pure Ti) with different lug widths, bezels etc. Alessandro offered me so much choice that I couldn’t make up my mind. The fact he told me that any of the dial styles & hands could be reproduced in any pantone colour I wanted didn’t help matters (or, he said, they could make a dial to my design). I was convinced I would eventually choose a blue dial, but in the end I took a leap of faith…..
It’s obvious from the founders backgrounds that this would be the case, but Ennebi focuses heavily on engineering. This is evident in many of the details, from the bezel to the the buckle – all are made with an engineer’s eye for function. The was even the option to receive the certificates for all the watch components, showing the origin of the materials and the testing they have undergone before being passed.
Being made of titanium of course it’s quite light, but it’s certainly not a watch to wear with a suit (not that you could get it under a shirt cuff!). It’s a monster of a watch – easily my largest watch at 47mm diameter and 18mm tall, and I don’t think I’d want anything bigger.
One of the questions that is often asked about the Fondale is about the bezel – how can it be considered a dive watch without minute markers? To explain this you need to understand where the inspiration for the Fondale came from. As I mentioned briefly before, the inspiration for Ennebi’s first watch came from the Panerai prototype that Alessandro designed in the 1980’s. Alessandro, chief designer at that time, was given a brief to design a new watch for the military divers market, and specifically the Italian Navy divers who were mainly shallow water divers. He came up with this –
This was the basis for the Fondale – with some tweaks (notice the lack of the D-shaped crown guard on the Fondale – a Panerai trademark, of course). But why no minute marks on the bezel? The original watch was designed for navy divers and those specifically that made shallow dives. These divers used a unit called a “re-breather” which allowed them to breathe pure oxygen. The unit had a small tank of pure O2 attached to a bag, which had an appearance similar to an accordion, from which the diver would breathe. The air was extracted from the and then it was filled with oxygen from the bottle. As the diver breathed in the bag would deflate, and it would inflate as the diver breathed out. Periodically more oxygen would be added to replace that absorbed by the divers lungs, and to remove the poisonous CO2 in the exhaled air there was a canister that contained caustic Barium Hydroxide (as the exhaled air passed through the canister the chemical would combine with the CO2 removing it from the breathing oxygen). In this way the small volume of gas was breathed over and over again. The rebreathers of today are not dissimilar to those used by the Decima Flottiglia MAS during the two world Wars.
Because of the design, a small bottle of oxygen, about the size of today’s pony bottles, allowed the diver to remain underwater for up to 4 hours, and this is the point. The watch was designed for long dives, where the duration was measured in hours rather than minutes. The divers would align the bezel pip to the hour hand on the watch so they knew roughly how long they had been under-water. Because of the fact they were breathing pure O2 there was no chance of decompression sickness, and as long as they stayed above 6m they were not in danger of oxygen toxicity. The need to time the dive was simply as a guide to how much oxygen was left in the system.
For anyone interested in reading about Ennebi , here is a link to their website – www.ennebi.eu