SIR OSBERT SITWELL, 5TH BT. (1892-1969)
The elder son of Sir George Reresby Sitwell, Osbert, along with his brother Sacheverell and sister Edith, devoted his life to art and literature. He was raised at Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire and Scarborough, another Sitwell home. After Eton (1906-9), his father steered him away from Oxford and into a military career, initially with the Sherwood Rangers and later, happily, with the Grenadier Guards. Osbert, ever the aesthete, was not cut out for soldiering, though. Fortunately, when called up for the trenches in November 1914, he saw action at Ypres and miraculously found his calling in poetry when composing a short poem entitled 'Babel', grieving over the futility and barbarity of armed conflict. For the rest of his life he devoted himself to the arts, in particular poetry, art criticism and controversial journalism, forming one part of the famed literary and aesthetic trio that were the Sitwell siblings. From the end of the First World War until 1944, Osbert produced several novels, a collection of short stories, a book of essays and a selection of poems, all of which received moderate acclaim. His breakthrough came following his father's death and his succession to the baronetcy in 1943, when, filled with thoughts of his own mortality, he concentrated on his autobiography Left Hand, Right Hand (1945), which eventually ran to five volumes. This became his magnum opus and the work for which he is best remembered. His last book, Pound Wise, was finished in 1963. On 4 May 1969 he succumbed to Parkinson's disease and died at Castello di Montegufoni, Tuscany, the sprawling Baroque Palace bought by his father, Sir George, for Osbert in 1905.

During the Second World War the Castello di Montegufoni played host to hundreds of treasures from Florence’s museums, sent there by Mussolini’s government at the start of the war for their protection against Allied air raids. A remarkable photograph taken by one of the ‘Monuments Men’, Albert Sheldon Pennoyer, from the summer of 1944 when Allied forces were advancing into the Tuscan countryside, shows the clock in the hall of the castle, surrounded by Medieval and Renaissance paintings, including Sabastiano Mainardi's Saints Stephen, James, and Peter from the Accademia.

Very little is known about the clockmaker Francesco Grassi. He was born on 4 July 1731 in Casacalenna (now known as Casacalenda), Molise, to Michele and Domenica Ferraro. He married Antonia Prassede Stera in 1755 and together they had seven children. In the 1785 church census ‘Stato delle Anime’ of Santa Maria Maggiore in Casacalenda, it is mentioned that Francesco Grassi was an ‘excellent clockmaker’. It is believed that he moved at some point, probably for work, as he is not recorded in later censuses for Casacalenda. Dated to 1758, this clock movement is therefore a fairly early example of his work and one of the few known to survive.