WHY WE LIKE IT

When it comes to chronograph complications, Minerva has crafted movements of the highest quality imaginable. From its very beginning (1858), the newly founded Minerva factory, conceived by the Robert brothers and built in the small town of Villeret, Switzerland, has focused all its engineering and production efforts on offering chronograph machines of absolute precision and robustness. Although it has also produced excellent time-only calibers in-house, today as in the past, Minerva is anchored in the memory of enthusiasts and scholars as the Maison that developed, patented, and created some of the most important chronograph movements in the history of watchmaking.
The reference 1335 represents the pinnacle of the limited production of wrist chronographs with a water- and shock-resistant steel case. Equipped with a magnificent 13-20 CH movement, it was born at the dawn of the 1940s, immediately embodying the essence, the complete soul, of the small Maison from Villeret. In the short span of about five years, the ref. 1335 has undergone incredible transformations, both in the technical and architectural aspects of the movement, the morphology of the case, and the purely aesthetic aspects of the dial layout.
This succession of transformations and evolutions speaks to a precise desire: to create the ultimate sports wrist chronograph. And, in this writer’s opinion, the “small” Minerva manufacture has fully achieved this goal, developing a wrist chronograph that is immediately recognizable and of the highest possible construction quality.