Robert Downey Jr. wears a Bulgari Diagono Sport

Tony Stark wears more than one watch in the first Iron Man, and the quieter of them arrives in a gift box. After Stark is ambushed in Afghanistan and makes it home, Obadiah Stane hands him a watch with a note: "Tony, thank God it wasn't your time." The cruel joke, which the film pays off later, is that Stane engineered the ambush. The watch is a Bvlgari Diagono Sport, a chronograph with a brown dial on a black leather strap, and its bezel reads "BVLGARI BVLGARI" around the rim. That double-logo bezel is the oldest idea in the brand's watchmaking: it goes back to the 1977 Bvlgari-Roma, whose engraved ring borrowed the look of the inscriptions around ancient Roman coins, and it became the signature that carried Bvlgari from jeweler to watchmaker. It is worth clearing up an old confusion. For years this watch was filed alongside a supposed Hublot, but aBlogtoWatch reported that the production used only Bvlgari, which had sponsored the film; the louder opening-scene watch is a second Bvlgari Diagono, not a Hublot. Two Italian sports watches on a man whose garage is full of Italian cars. Stark buys Italian because it looks good, and before the cave that is most of what he is.