Heritage

The Heritage collection (also presented as Heritage Chronométrie) was born in 2018, coinciding with the 160th anniversary of the founding of Minerva, as the project through which Montblanc makes more visible to the public its work recovering the historical archive of the Villeret manufacture. Under the guidance of the then head of the watch division, Davide Cerrato, the team drew directly on the technical drawings, calibers and aesthetic codes preserved in the Minerva archives to build a collection that does not merely "quote" the past, but literally reprises its constructive solutions.

The line's aesthetic language looks to the elegance of the 1940s and 1950s, a period in which color palettes such as salmon, smoky caramel and bright silver were common on dials of the era: the Heritage recovers them on domed dials with sunburst finishes, paired with dot indexes, Arabic numerals at 12 and 6 o'clock, and domed sapphire crystals that reproduce the profile of the original vintage cases.

The most radical model in the archive's recovery is the Heritage Pulsograph, a limited edition of 100 pieces that revives the 1920s Minerva caliber 13.20 in a renewed version (caliber MB M13.21, hand-wound with Côtes de Genève finishing), complete with a pulsometer scale for measuring heart rate: a detail typical of early-twentieth-century wrist chronographs, when this function was actually used by medical personnel. Alongside it, the collection includes the Monopusher Chronograph with automatic caliber MB 25.12, the Perpetual Calendar with the in-house caliber MB 29.22 (which introduces a bidirectional crown-adjustment system), and more accessible variants such as GMT and Automatic, conceived as a more modest point of entry into the Minerva universe.