Giovanni Battista Bergallo Tower Clock Museum

The "Giovanni Battista Bergallo" Tower Clock Museum is located in Piazza Canonico Folco in the hamlet of Bardino Nuovo in the municipality of Tovo San Giacomo, in the province of Savona.

The museum houses the clocks handcrafted for towers and bell towers in the Bergallo family home-workshop, between 1860 and 1980. The clocks made in over a century of activity are still present on bell towers and civic towers in Italy and abroad.

The museum is associated with "Museimpresa", the Italian association of business museums.

The Bergallo family built tower clocks between 1860 and 1980 in their house-workshop in Bardino Nuovo (still visible today in via San Sebastiano) where all the manufacturing activities took place. Giovanni Battista Bergallo, the last master watchmaker, died in 1996 at the age of 92, leaving no heirs who could continue the craft business.

The first public exhibition of the clocks and parts of them (hands, dials and mechanisms), coming from the Bergallo workshop took place on the occasion of the inauguration of the new elementary schools in Tovo San Giacomo on 15 September 1984 and Giovanni Battista Bergallo on that occasion wished the creation of a museum that would collect the testimonies of the activity, to which it is possible to donate artefacts and archives.

The museum was established in 1996 and inaugurated on April 7, 1997. At the time of its inauguration, the museum was the first of its kind in Italy. In 2002 work began for the expansion and modernization of the former municipal building of the hamlet, which ended in 2011, with the new layout.

Map: Giovanni Battista Bergallo Tower Clock Museum