
In the shop, we often hear people talking about instruments with generalizations like “French violins sound nasal”, or “Italian violins sound warm and expensive”.
You better bet we’re here to smash that fiction!

While there is no doubt that there are certain makers who are historically a cut above pretty much everyone else, we want to touch on generalizations about Italian and French sounds.
The approaches to making bowed string instruments in France and Italy has varied (and continues to vary) as widely as the cuisines across France and Italy. From region to region, town to town, and time period to time period, instruments vary in shape, varnish, and in a myriad other ways. It’s also important to keep in mind that Italy was a conglomeration of city-states, republics, and other independent entities until 1861, and France, of course, had its own historical divisions (for some reason, there were some years in the late 1700s that many French violins lacked scrolls*).

In the first few hundred years of violin making, the fundamental mindset toward and approach to the art form vastly differed from region to region.
In Cremona, Andrea Amati originally come up with what we think of as a violin in the mid to late 1500s, and his method including building the instrument off an internal form. Because of Amati’s innovation, most Cremonese makers from that time period also tended to work off an internal form. In Brescia, the concept of violin making was completely different, and current thinking holds that many of the early Brescian instruments were built off the back without a form. In Venice, there were likely a number of different approaches to violin making, and there was certainly a wide variation in practices in what we now think of as Central Italy. Further north in Tyrol, makers likely built on the back without the use of an internal form.
Additionally, musicians and violin makers traveled more extensively than we modern folks tend to give them credit for. Andrea Amati was commissioned to build instruments for King Charles IX of France, and The Brothers Amati and Gasparo da Salò all exported instruments to France. Furthermore, the influence of 17th century Tyrolean makers made its way into Holland, France, England, and throughout Northern Italy and the Italian peninsula.
To continue the topic of cross-border influence, Philip Kass has written the following regarding early violin making in Turin:
“In the 1640s… Christine Marie, who was also the daughter of Henri IV of France, became regent [of Turin], and during her reign imported a great deal of the culture she had known while growing up in Paris, including dancers and musicians. It is my belief that these musicians brought the earliest violins into the court; not instruments from Cremona, but rather from Paris and the Low Countries, from where most French musicians were then acquiring their instruments. These Franco–Flemish violins served as the model for what would soon be created in Turin.”*
https://tarisio.com/cozio-archive/cozio-carteggio/violin-making-in-turin-part-1-1650-1770/Violin Making in Turin, part 1 (1650–1770)

All this is to say that the historic methods of violin making have varied greatly from workshop to workshop, and with such remarkable influence between workshops and across borders, that it would be impossible to say that either Italian or French violins have some sort of unified sound.

From L to R:
Makers from Turin: Cappa, Pressenda, Rocca
Makers from Cremona: Andrea Amati, Antonio Stradivari, Brothers Amati
Makers from Brescia: Maggini, P.G. Rogeri, G.B. Rogeri
“The Cozio Archive.” Tarisio, 17 Sept. 2024, tarisio.com/cozio-archive/.
The fact of the matter is that there are great sounding instruments (and unpleasant sounding instruments) from all over the world and from many time periods. The sound and workmanship of an instrument really just depends on the individual makers and their particular approaches to making. After all, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”.
Additionally, the lines of regional making continue to be blurred: Giovanni Capalbo, Matteo Bruni, Camillo Mandelli, Alfio Bateli, Sergio Peresson and Simone Sacchoni were all born and trained in Italy, but moved abroad to Argentina, Venezuela, and the United States… Stefano Conia worked in Cremona but was from Hungary… what truly makes an instrument Italian?
In fact, these days, there’s a very good chance that when you go to a concert, the stringed instruments being played are neither antique nor European! Yo-Yo Ma often performs on a Peter and Wendy Moes cello, Ruggiero Ricci often performed on a Joseph Curtin violin, Elmar Oliveira often performs on a Gregg Alf violin, Maxim Vengerov often plays a Sam Zygmuntowicz violin, Edward Dusinberre plays an Eduard Miller violin, Jacqueline DuPre played a Sergio Peresson cello, Mark Summers plays a Grubaugh & Seifert Cello, the Alexander String Quartet plays on Francis Kuttner instruments, and these are just a few examples!
As John Dilworth has said in Four Centuries of Violin Making:
“The question of ‘Italian tone’ is much disputed. Players and dealers will insist that Italian instruments possess unique qualities that cannot be found elsewhere. The truth is probably a bit more mundane. There are more old Italian instruments of the best class and quality in existence than any others purely because of the unique length of the history of the craft in that country….In truth, outside the outstandingly great Italian makers, headed by the triumvirate of Amati, Stradivari, and Guarneri, the instruments of few other Italian makers are intrinsically superior in sound to those of the better makers in other countries.”*
*Ingles, Tim. “Four Centuries of Violin Making: Fine Instruments from the Southeby’s Archive.” pp. 15-16
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