Panerai was born in Florence, cradle of the Renaissance, the art and the science which have made Italy famous throughout the world for its creativity and genius. Values that Officine Panerai expresses through its watches, which it reinterprets over time with passion, technical excellence and exclusive design. 

A watch-making laboratory, highly specialized since the XIX century, supplier of measurement and precision instruments to the Italian Navy in the nineteen hundreds, fine watchmaker and international brand in the twenty-first century. 

To meet the military needs of the Royal Italian Navy, which it had already been supplying with high precision instruments for a number of years, Officine Panerai creates Radiomir, a radium-based powder that gives luminosity to the dials of sighting instruments and devices.

Reference to the name "Radiomir" is documented in the supplement to the patent filed in France on 23 March 1916. The substance's high visibility and the paint's excellent underwater adhesive qualities immediately make the radium paste a key element in Officine Panerai’s production. The Radiomir patent will be the first of the many patents filed to mark Panerai's history of innovation.