Rolexopedia

Rolex Padellone


Padellone names a pair, not a single watch. The 8171 and the 6062 are the only two references Rolex ever put into series production with a full calendar and a moonphase — day, date, month, and lunar phase, built around the same complication architecture, sold alongside each other from 1949 to 1953 and never revived as a production line again until 2026. "Padellone" itself, Italian for "big pan," is properly the 8171's own nickname, earned by its oversized 38mm dress case; the 6062 answers to "Stelline," after its star-marker dial. Collectors and auction houses treat the two as a single family, and this page does the same.

Period Rolex print advertisement for the 6062 "Cosmograph," showing the triple-calendar moonphase complication
Period Rolex advertisement for the 6062, marketed at launch as the "Cosmograph" — a name Rolex would not attach to the Daytona for another decade

Common entry points

Holding a non-Oyster dress watch with a snap-on caseback?
8171
The "Padellone" proper. 38mm, snap-on caseback, non-waterproof, caliber A.295 CPL. The reference the nickname was coined for.
Holding a waterproof Oyster with the same complication?
6062
The "Stelline." 36mm Oyster case, screw-down caseback and crown, caliber 655. Twice the record holder for the most expensive Rolex ever sold at auction.

What the pair is

By the late 1940s Rolex had assembled the pieces of the modern Oyster Perpetual — a waterproof case, automatic winding, chronometer certification, a date window — without yet combining them into a genuine high complication. The 8171 and 6062 were the answer, introduced within a year of each other and produced concurrently through 1953. Both share the same complication layout: day and month in twin apertures at 12, moonphase at 6 on a blue champlevé enamel disc, and date on a peripheral chapter ring read by a central pointer. Both were produced in 18K yellow gold, 18K pink gold, and stainless steel. Neither founded a lasting line — Rolex replaced both with the simpler Day-Date in 1956, dropping the month display and moonphase entirely, and did not put a moonphase back into a production wristwatch until the Cellini Moonphase in 2017.

The two references are not, however, mechanically identical. The 8171 is the dress watch: 38mm, snap-on caseback, no water resistance, running caliber A.295 CPL, the same movement platform used in the 4467 Big Bubbleback ("Ovettone") fitted with a complete-calendar-and-moonphase module. The 6062 is the Oyster: 36mm, screw-down caseback and crown, waterproof, running caliber 655, a "Super-Balance" movement Rolex built specifically for the model. Christie's and Sotheby's lot descriptions and Hodinkee's dedicated in-depth piece all independently name caliber 655 for the 6062, the better-evidenced reading against a Phillips collectors' guide that describes the pair as sharing "the same self-winding caliber." Case, water resistance, and movement are what separate them; the complication and the era are what unite them.

Why the names differ

Padellone is Italian for "big pan" — padella (pan) plus the -one augmentative suffix, the same diminutive-augmentative pattern that gives the Bubbleback family its Ovetto/Ovettone (little egg/big egg) split. Italian collectors coined it for the 8171 specifically, registering how far its 38mm case stood out against 1950s dress watches running 32–34mm. Stelline, "little stars," names the 6062's most recognized dial rather than its case — applied five-pointed star hour markers, more common in the surviving population than any of the reference's other dial types (dagger, Explorer, pyramid, spade, and a rare black lacquer dial). The two nicknames describe different things about different watches; collectors nonetheless use "Padellone" loosely to mean the pair, and auction catalogs for either reference routinely cross-reference the other.

Auction standing

The 6062 is, by a wide margin, the more valuable of the two at auction. A black-dial, diamond-marker 6062 known as the "Bao Dai," commissioned in 1954 by Vietnam's last emperor during a visit to Rolex in Geneva, has twice held the record for the most expensive Rolex ever sold: CHF 370,000 in 2002, then CHF 5,066,000 in May 2017. In October 2025, a second black-diamond-dial 6062 broke the reference's own record, selling for USD 6.2 million at Monaco Legend Group's Exclusive Timepieces auction in Monte Carlo. Per Forbes, that is the third-highest price ever paid for a Rolex at auction, and Hodinkee independently previewed the lot ahead of the sale. The 8171's own record sits far below that tier: Christie's December 2013 "Sleeping Beauty," a stainless steel example with diamond-set numerals, sold for USD 1,145,000, and Phillips' 2019 Geneva pair set the reference's yellow gold (CHF 980,000) and steel (CHF 1,028,000) benchmarks. Both references reward condition and dial originality over any specific configuration; see each reference's own Auction record section for the fuller picture.

Renewed attention: the 2026 Perpetual Padellone

In September 2026, Rolex released the Perpetual Padellone (refs. 53505 and 53506) — a modern annual-calendar moonphase dress watch in 18K Everose gold or 950 platinum, part of the Perpetual 1908 family. Rolex named it "Padellone" officially, adopting the collector nickname outright, and both Monochrome and Revolution's launch coverage credit the 8171 and 6062 directly as its ancestors: the new watch pairs a day/month display at 12 and a moonphase at 6 — the same layout the 8171 and 6062 established in 1949 — with a new in-house movement, caliber 7190, built on the Land-Dweller's caliber 7135 architecture and Dynapulse escapement, plus a new "Haplos" annual-calendar system. It is Rolex's first return to a genuine calendar complication in more than seventy years.

The Perpetual Padellone is current production and sits outside this wiki's pre-2020 vintage scope; it does not have its own reference page here. It is noted on this hub because it is the reason the 8171 and 6062 pairing is, once again, current news rather than a closed chapter of Rolex history — and because Rolex's own choice of name confirms the collector nickname this hub is built around.

Related families

  • Pre-Daytona chronographs — the Datocompax chronograph-plus-calendar references (4767, 5036, 6036, 6236) occupy the same complication-flagship ambition of the same era, built on a Valjoux 72C ébauche rather than an in-house automatic caliber.
  • Oyster & Bubbleback — the 8171 shares its A.295 movement platform with the 4467 Big Bubbleback ("Ovettone"), and the Padellone/Ovettone names follow the same Italian augmentative pattern.
  • Precision — a different admitted vintage/historical bucket, the non-chronometer Oyster Precision tier running alongside the Padellone pair's own chronometer-certified production.

Shared references

Sources

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