Archtop Guitars With Italian Flare

by Stephen Marchione

from his 2011 GAL Convention lecture

Originally published in American Lutherie #115, 2013



I lived in northern Italy as a kid, in a town near Cremona called Bergamo. In the town square there was a violin maker who also made some guitars. I walked by his workshop every morning on the way to school. I was eight years old and I would always stop to look in the window. My mom was saying, “Hurry up, you’ll be late for school!” and I was like, “Wow! That looks much better than school!”

Venetian Italy or Cremonese Italy is the birthplace of the violin and the archtop tradition. The way that architecture and art is treated and looked at there has some important lessons that can be carried into lutherie. As soon as you get to Venice (Photo 1), you notice that everything is in order and everything is built to look a certain way. You can see that people put a lot of time and effort into first imagining how it would look, and then learning a way to create it that would be beautiful and long lasting.