Panerai Unveils Two New Submersible Marina Militare Watches

Panerai has been making instruments for the Italian Navy since the 1910s, long before it made watches, supplying depth gauges and compasses for missions at sea. Its Submersible line, introduced in 1998 with the PAM00024 Luminor Submersible Automatic Acciaio, is the most rugged expression of that heritage, defined by a unidirectional rotating bezel that makes it a professional diving tool. This week, the Florentine maison adds two new references to the Submersible Marina Militare family: the Destro PAM01757 and the GMT PAM01758. They share a design but differ in more than a crown.

Submersible Marina Militare Destro PAM01757

The Destro is the larger and the more unusual of the two. At 44mm in diameter and 13.94mm thick, its brushed steel case moves the crown, and the bridge and lever that protect it, to the left side, a configuration Panerai has long made a speciality and one that keeps the crown from pressing into the wrist of anyone who wears a watch on the right. The unidirectional bezel carries a matte black ceramic insert with raised markers for the diving scale, and water resistance is rated at 500 metres.

The dial is a grained black with applied hour markers and a recessed small seconds, its hands and markers finished in beige Super-LumiNova, a shade that echoes the patina on vintage Panerai watches. Inside is the P.980 automatic calibre, produced at ValFleurier, which runs at 4Hz with a 72-hour power reserve from a single barrel. The solid caseback is engraved with the Siluro a Lenta Corsa, the Slow Speed Torpedo nicknamed the Maiale, a human-guided underwater vehicle used by the Italian Navy in the 1940s.

Submersible Marina Militare GMT PAM01758

The GMT is the more versatile watch. At 42mm in diameter and 14.38mm thick, it wears a little more easily despite being slightly thicker, and carries the same black ceramic bezel, solid caseback and 500 metres of water resistance. The dial adds a date window at 3 o'clock, a 24-hour scale on an angled inner flange and a GMT hand with an orange and beige tip, with the small seconds flipped to the opposite side. It is a caller-style GMT, with the 24-hour hand adjusted independently of the hour hand.

It runs on the P.900/GMT24H calibre, also from ValFleurier, at 28,800 vibrations per hour with a power reserve of three days.

Straps, Availability And Price

Both watches come on a gold-brown "ponte vecchio" vintage leather strap with a trapezoidal brushed steel pin buckle, with a second black accordion-style rubber strap included. The caseback of each is engraved "Annual Production", which signals that they are limited not by number but by an annual production cap. Both are available now.

Price: EUR 12,300 (approx. Rs 13.8 lakh) for the PAM01757 Destro and EUR 12,700 (approx. Rs 14.2 lakh) for the PAM01758 GMT.