The Violin Maker Part 5

The circus, mostly, had struck its tent and moved on by the time I asked Sam about the Messiah brouhaha one day while I sat in his studio and watched him sc.r.a.pe away at the belly of the Drucker fiddle. Sam knew Pollens. Years before, Pollens had written a long article about Sam for The Strad, The Strad, doc.u.menting his re-creation of a Guarneri violin. "I can't understand why he got into all this," Sam told me. "I really can't see what he had to gain from it all." doc.u.menting his re-creation of a Guarneri violin. "I can't understand why he got into all this," Sam told me. "I really can't see what he had to gain from it all."

But what an exciting session it was of the ongoing game of What Do We Really Know?

"I guess," Sam said. He pushed his gla.s.ses up on his forehead and peered intently at the spot he'd been sc.r.a.ping. "I know that this wood is some of the lightest I've ever worked with. It's really incredible stuff. And that's all that matters to me right now." With that Zygmuntowicz went back to his work.

Chapter 10.

WE GO TO CREMONA.

Topping over the Swiss and Italian Alps on an early morning flight from Zurich to Milan in an uncrowded plane with a very friendly crew will easily be one of my best travel memories ever. I was on my way to Cremona. My pilgrim's progress in the violin world seemed incomplete without this pilgrimage.

When I told my fiancee that I thought it necessary to run off to Italy for research we came very close to recreating that scene in To Kill a Mockingbird To Kill a Mockingbird where young Jem Finch decides to accompany his father on the grim trip to inform his client's wife that her husband is dead. where young Jem Finch decides to accompany his father on the grim trip to inform his client's wife that her husband is dead.

"You want me to go with you?" Jana asked me.

"No, I think I'd better go out there alone," I told her, as Atticus Finch had told his son.

"I'm goin' with you."

And that was that. Now, Jana sat beside me, sipping a rich, foamy cappuccino and marveling at the way the sun sparkled off the snow of the Alpine peaks, which were so close it seemed we could lean out of the plane and scoop up a s...o...b..ll.

The next leg of our trip was a substantial comedown. Slogging our luggage through the dingy vault of the old Milan train station. Tripping through my hastily crammed traveler's Italian to get us tickets on the Mantova line. Fighting through jet lagladen fatigue to get something to eat, trade for some euros, and catch the right train. But we were going to Cremona! I was going to walk the same cobblestones that Stradivari walked, maybe sit in the same church pew, breathe the same air, and watch the same sunset.

Sam Zygmuntowicz was not especially encouraging when I told him of this trip. He'd been to Cremona and seemed resolutely unimpressed. "You might find something of interest," he said stoically. "At least you'll eat well." But I ignored his lack of enthusiasm and sided with his colleague and rival Gregg Alf, whom I'd met at the violin makers' workshop in Oberlin. When he was young, Alf had moved to Cremona to study violin making and stayed on for eight years. Alf had written, "I felt that the spirit of Stradivari would be in the air."

After clattering through the dull industrial suburbs of Milan, the train took us eastward into countryside that turned increasingly rural and agricultural with each pa.s.sing kilometer. We were in the rich, fertile floodplain of the Po River, mostly brown now in fall, but with a few brilliant patches of green here and there. Jana and I sat nervously, watching the countryside, letting the unintelligible and musical language of our fellow travelers wash over us, checking again and again with the conductor.

Cremona?

Not yet.

I decided to distract myself with the book I'd been rereading on the transatlantic flight. Just before I began this whole project I'd taken a short trip to New Orleans and met a doctor there who played violin seriously. When I told him that I was about to see how a violin is built, he told me forcefully: "You have to read The Violin Hunter The Violin Hunter." It turned out to be a good prescription.

The book is a historical biographical novel by William Alexander Silverman, who wrote it in 1957. The violin hunter of the t.i.tle is Luigi Tarisio, who had died owning the Messiah. Starting as a poor itinerant carpenter and dance fiddler, Tarisio dedicated his life to rediscovering and collecting the then-neglected violins of Cremona's Golden Age.

Now locked in a shabby second-cla.s.s train car, I retraced the journey Tarisio had made on foot in the mid-1820s, wandering from his home in Milan toward Cremona, doing odd jobs for his bed and supper, hoping to fiddle at a dance, shrewdly stopping at monasteries where he knew he could find not only a charitable host, but also perhaps some dusty fiddles commissioned more than a hundred years before.

However he did it, wherever he found them, Luigi Tarisio appeared in Paris in 1827 with a sack full of old violins. Legend has it that he had walked all the way from Italy, carrying the trove of masterpieces on his back. He was rough around the edges, but Tarisio knew enough to search out the leading violin makers and dealers of the day-M. Aldric, Georges Chanot, and Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume.

With the appearance of these previously unknown fiddles, word spread through Paris quickly. During his visit, Tarisio provided Paganini with the del Gesu that would become his lifelong love, an instrument so powerful it was called the Cannon. Leaving behind several Stradivaris, a Bergonzi, and a couple violins by lesser-known Cremonese, the violin hunter returned to Milan with a wallet stuffed with francs to finance and renew his search. Over the years he unearthed scores of Cremonese instruments and became a primary agent in rebuilding Stradivari's reputation.

There has been plenty of revisionist work on the biography of Tarisio. It's commonly accepted that he placed fake Stradivari labels in lesser instruments, though he hardly started that practice and would certainly not be the last culprit to do so. Tarisio took the credo "Buy low, sell high" very seriously, and probably cheated some unknowing Italians out of valuable pieces. But Silverman paints a warm-hued portrait of the man, lanky and plain, unlucky at love, committed to the old violins with a nearly religious fervor. As our train finally pulled into Cremona, I looked up at the tall bell tower of the Torrazzo attached to the town's main cathedral, the inevitable first view one gets of the town. You can't miss it; Cremona is a low-built provincial place, and the Torrazzo is the tallest bell tower in Europe. I realized that I now shared one small experience with Tarisio and, come to think of it, many of the legends of the violin world.

We waited near the grim, dirty train station-it spoke of Mussolini more than Stradivari-for Patricia Kaden, whom I'd retained to guide us through the city and its cache of violin lore. A French Canadian by birth, she'd lived in Paris for a while, then landed in Cremona more than a decade before my visit with a husband who'd decided to become a violin maker and wanted to go to the source. He was no longer in Cremona, but Patricia had stayed on and used her affinity for fiddles and trilingual skills to help folks like me. She advertised her services in a few violin journals, so I'd heard of her, but it was a violin maker I'd met at Oberlin who had convinced me I should hire Patricia. "She knows the town," he'd told me. "Not just the violins, but the restaurants and cafes."

Patricia arrived pus.h.i.+ng a big old bicycle. She was a small woman in latter middle age, friendly and attractive, with a propensity for walking. "No need for a cab," she said, "follow me." We wheeled and dragged our luggage through uneven streets and over stone sidewalks for what seemed like an hour until we finally reached the Palazzo Cattaneo, the ancestral home of Duke Cattaneo, a das.h.i.+ng man (Patricia whispered that he'd enjoyed a reputation as a European playboy in his day) who'd turned the palazzo into something of an artists' colony. We climbed four narrow, twisting flights of stairs to an attic suite with a giant wood beam just high enough to stand under in the parlor, a beautiful marble bath, and a small bedroom. "I love it," Jana said. "It's ancient." That seemed worth the fifty euros a night we were being charged.

"You probably want to rest a little," Patricia said. "But come tonight and join us for aperitivo aperitivo at six or so. You'll meet some people." at six or so. You'll meet some people."

It is estimated that there are now more violin makers working in Cremona than there were in all the years from the first Amati through Bergonzi, when the violin's design and construction was being developed and perfected. That's probably an estimation uttered with some sarcasm; but when Jana and I arrived for drinks that evening at a bustling little alley cafe called the Bar Bolero, Patricia handed me a printed list of luthiers in town. It went alphabetically from Katarina Abbuhl to Nicola Zurlini-ninety-eight listings. Many of the listings were firms where several partners worked. So there were well over a hundred violin makers plying their trade in Cremona at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Even after just a few hours in town, it was easy to see what attracted them. Cremona was a charming place. When the sun went down and the mist rolled in from the Po, there seemed to be an otherworldly quality to the old city. If you let your imagination run just a little, it was easy to feel that Stradivari's spirit was indeed in the air.

There was also a very practical lure: the International School of Violin Making, the only school of its kind in Italy, which offers a five-year program that awards a diploma as a master of violin making. Italian kids could enter the school at the age of fourteen and earn their high school diploma and the technical degree. Over the years, the school has attracted a large number of foreign students, most of whom, like Gregg Alf, arrive in Italy as adults. Alf, I would learn, was still something of a legend in Cremona for driving around town in a Jaguar convertible. The local police would stop him all the time-not to arrest him, but just to marvel at the big engine.

The school was born, not coincidentally, in 1938, a year after the two-hundredth anniversary of Stradivari's death. In 1937, the city of Cremona hosted a celebration and exhibition dedicated to the city's most famous son. The popularity of the event convinced the Mussolini government (reportedly, Il Duce himself was fond of fiddles) that there was good public relations potential in reviving the Italian violin making tradition. The school's founders offered the directors.h.i.+p to Simone Sacconi, the Roman-trained luthier who'd helped organize the Stradivari exhibition. He turned down the job. He had recently moved to New York, where it wasn't long before he became the widely acknowledged master of violin restoration at the famed House of Wurlitzer, and fanatical devotee of Stradivari. But Sacconi would not forget Cremona.

No one interested in violins could forget Cremona. However, for many years Cremona had forgotten its ill.u.s.trious cadre of luthiers. Most glaring was the town's neglect of Stradivari.

In 1869 the church where Antonio and his second wife were buried, San Domenico, was torn down, and the bones from the burial vaults were mixed and unidentified and supposedly reburied by workmen somewhere outside of town. (There is some suspicion that they simply dumped the bones in the Po.) Stradivari's house and workshop had survived into the 1920s, by which time the rooms that saw the supreme mastery of the luthier's art had become a tailor shop and a pool hall. The government replaced it with an office building just before the great Depression.

In the acc.u.mulated literature devoted to Strad, nearly every violin fanatic who makes the trek to Cremona writes a sad report of neglect. In The Glory of the Violin The Glory of the Violin, Joseph Wechsler, who arrived in 1948, wrote, "Like other pilgrims I found nothing at all. The houses where they lived had disappeared. No streets were named after them. There was not even a great Cremonese violin left in the city where they had been created." Wechsler found a sixth-generation descendant of the master, a lawyer named Mario Stradivari, who complained that he hadn't even been invited to the great exhibition of 1937. The city's leading expert on Stradivari at the time, Renzo Bacchetta, explained to Wechsler that Cremona was simply a provincial town understandably fixated on what supported its citizens. "They cared only that the price of cheese should stay up," Wechsler reported. "If Stradivari had invented a new kind of cheese, they would have built him a monument."

Somehow, Mussolini's government had changed all that, and now Cremona held a significant number of people who revered Stradivari. I met about a dozen my first night there.

On our first visit to the Bar Bolero, Patricia introduced Jana to the charms of the dry sparkling wine called prosecco prosecco. I stayed stalwart to my crude American habit of drinking whiskey before dinner. A sample of some fresh local cheeses made me understand why someone might want to monumentalize the makers. Through the evening violin makers came and went. Over the years I have hung around a number of bars that catered to a particular clientele-cops, musicians, journalists, actors, people who worked in other bars-but I'd never even imagined there could be a watering hole where you could be sure to meet a violin maker. One, a small man named Toto who wore a jaunty hat and scarf, invited us to visit his workshop whenever we liked. Another, Marco, a solidly built guy with a high forehead and dark, piercing eyes, chatted formally with us for a few moments and then moved away. I glanced in his direction a little while later and found him staring at me, and not in a friendly way.

I talked mostly with Franz, a foppish thin man who'd worked as a violin maker in Cremona for many years. He was just back for a visit, since he'd recently moved to Zurich, where he was playing guitar with a band that performed the gypsy jazz music made popular by Django Reinhart. "As a violin maker I had to deal with these musicians all the time," he told me. "They just drove me crazy. I got so sick of musicians that I decided to become one."

As Sam Zygmuntowicz had predicted, that night we ate quite well.

The next morning I got out early with a map, trying to make a quick survey of sites that the town had created to counteract its reputation for neglecting Antonio Stradivari. Cremona on a weekday morning had a comfortable small-town feel, as shopkeepers performed their opening rituals, parents dropped their children at schools, workmen patched some of the old streets. I felt like the only tourist in the whole city.

I wandered through the labyrinth of the old town, where the streets crisscrossed each other in a grid-defying maze. Across the via Plasio, left on the via Cavollatti, then I realized I was lost. After backtracking on via Mazinni and a shortcut through the vaulted walk-ways of the Galleria-there I was at the Piazza Roma, a small park that contained the symbolic tomb of Antonio Stradivari. It was a slab of red-hued marble, about the size of a coffin, sitting off on the side of a walking path. On top of the red marble was a white marble re-creation of the carved plaque from Strad's original crypt. The whole thing looked more like a resting bench than a monument. I stared at the "tomb" for a time, knowing that there was just about nothing there that was really connected to Stradivari. The monument looked forlorn and neglected. It seemed to embody an almost complete lack of significance. Then I unfolded my map and headed for the Piazza Stradivari.

Though it was a few short blocks from the heart of Cremona-the bustling Piazza di Commune-the Piazza Stradivari was a barren field of stone blocks, bordered by some of Cremona's more modern buildings, all of them giving off the strong scent of government bureaucracy. In the midst of the otherwise empty plaza stood a statue that, from a distance, looked like two vaguely human forms, man and boy. Unfortunately, from close up it looked nearly exactly the same-some form of man looking at some form of violinlike object held up to him by some form of child. Though one small detail of Stradivari's daily life has been pa.s.sed down through the generations-he always wore a white leather shop ap.r.o.n-the sculptor ignored that fact and clad the master in an elaborate cape. This was the town's tribute to Stradivari. I couldn't shake the following thought from my head: someone important in Cremona had a nephew who was a sculptor. I made my way back to the Palazzo Cattaneo to pick up Jana, hoping that our afternoon search to find the spirit of Stradivari would yield better results.

That afternoon, Patricia led us down the hushed halls of the Museo di Stradivari and into a big room filled with gla.s.s display cases and painted with a trompe l'oeil technique that made the simple flat walls seem like elaborately carved marble interiors of a palace. An ornate gla.s.s chandelier hung from the ceiling. The bizarre elegance seemed at odds with what the display cases held: stuff that had survived from Stradivari's workshop and the few little tidbits of doc.u.mentation on his life. Astonis.h.i.+ngly, the museum dedicated to the world's greatest violin maker didn't have one violin.

There was the bill for his first wife's funeral. He'd gone all out, hiring more than a hundred priests and fathers of various denominations (heavy on the Franciscans and Dominicans) to celebrate the ma.s.s, procuring big and little bells to be rung, retaining a corps of gravediggers with capes. Maybe the old guy was truly heartbroken. Perhaps he just felt the need to maintain appearances in a town where people spoke of being "rich as Stradivari." The historian who found these doc.u.ments told the Hills that Francesca Feraboschi Stradivari's funeral was "probably among the most conspicuous of the time."

Across the room, another case held the famous letter Strad sent a client apologizing for the delay in delivering a violin-the varnish simply needed more time to dry. I had read the translation of this letter in any number of books and articles about Stradivari. Finally seeing the real item made me understand better why the profound lack of raw material had led to such extreme speculation about nearly everything connected with the man. In the wake of the masterpieces he created, there was a gaping void left by the scant and mundane stuff that has survived from his life. The experts and the acolytes could study his violins with the fervor of religious fanatics. But the only doc.u.mentary evidence left from his life gave little more insight into the man than the fact that Antonio Stradivari was a lousy speller.

Delving deeper into this strangely static room, we stared into more cases that held faded drawings of f-holes, scrolls, and necks-Strad's templates for his work. There were calipers and cutting tools, several instrument molds that looked very similar to those I'd seen in Sam Zygmuntowicz's workshop, except the unvarnished wood of the master's forms was now aged and brown. The place reminded me, unfortunately, of the first museum I'd ever visited when I was a kid in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Everhart Museum had gla.s.s cases just like the ones I now viewed, filled with a carefully arrayed collection of dead moths. It was a cultural experience that stripped all the fun from getting out of school for an afternoon. The way the curators of Cremona presented the workshop materials of their genius native son had all the sweep and grandeur of a collection of dead moths. Months after I had returned from this trip to Italy, I read a sentence in another book that perfectly captured the essence of the Museo di Stradivari. Victoria Finlay, in her wonderful Color: A Natural History of the Palette Color: A Natural History of the Palette, writes of visiting Cremona searching for Stradivari's "secrets" with varnish pigments. Of the odd, stuffy, stultifying Museo dedicated to him, she decided, "It must qualify as one of the most boring museums about an interesting subject in the whole of Europe."

All the artifacts in the collection had been sold in the mid-1700s by Stradivari's last surviving son, the cloth merchant Paolo Stradivari, to Count Cozio di Salabue, who was building a collection of violins reputed to be the greatest ever a.s.sembled. When Count Cozio died, what was left of his collection ended up in the hands of his descendants. The Stradivari shop paraphernalia was sold in the early twentieth century to a Roman violin maker named Giuseppe Fiorini. Fiorini donated the material to the city of Cremona in 1930, so it was available for the big exhibition in 1937. After that, the stuff ended up in what the town fathers named the Museum of Organology on the third floor of the Palazzo dell'Arte. "This was a most unhappy location," according to Frances...o...b..ssolatti, a Cremona native who became a violin maker by going through the town's international school in the 1950s. Bissolatti set up a shop in town and taught at his alma mater for years.

In 1958, Simone Sacconi came back to Cremona for the first time since the exhibition he'd helped organize twenty years before. He was now an eminence in the violin trade. He met Frances...o...b..ssolatti, and the two luthiers became quick friends. When Sacconi saw the Stradivari workshop relics he lamented the haphazard way they were kept-"Everything denoted negligence and disinterest," according to Bissolatti, who wrote a remembrance of his mentor after Sacconi died. Sacconi convinced his young Cremonese violin maker friend to help him put the collection into better shape.

Sacconi had an intuition that in these dusty workshop materials lay the key to fully understanding Stradivari's methods. "Those molds and designs," Bissolatti remembered later, "were for [Sacconi] living testimony of the sublime art of that insuperable master." Starting in 1962, Sacconi came to Cremona nearly every year during his vacation from the House of Wurlitzer in New York. He once gave a course in restoration at the International School. He visited the local churches, following a hunch he had that the artisans who made the elaborate wood-carvings in the churches were linked somehow to the artisans who built fiddles. Bissolatti, who'd given Sacconi keys to his shop, would arrive for work at 7 A.M A.M. to find that his friend had already been working for two hours, perhaps on an experiment with the raw materials of varnish, trying to rediscover Stradivari's technique.

The tall, cultured, and gentle Sacconi had begun to build what would be the capstone of his career, of his whole life really, since he had almost totally devoted it to violins. He was writing a book that would decode and decipher the techniques of the great Maestro of Cremona. As much as anyone could, Sacconi would create that longed-for treatise that Stradivari never left behind. He finished it just before he died, after his last visit to Cremona, in 1972, and called the book I I " "Segreti" di Stradivari-The "Secrets" of Stradivari.

"I 'Segreti' di Stradivari was Simone Sacconi's final gift to his profession," wrote the London dealer Charles Beare, who had worked with Sacconi as an apprentice in the House of Wurlitzer workshop. "It has become almost a bible." was Simone Sacconi's final gift to his profession," wrote the London dealer Charles Beare, who had worked with Sacconi as an apprentice in the House of Wurlitzer workshop. "It has become almost a bible."

I had a bootlegged copy of The "Secrets" The "Secrets" that Sam Zygmuntowicz had obtained while in violin making school. Though it is possible to get a little stuck when Sacconi's writing starts to care more and more about less and less, there is still more life in those pages than in that room full of artifacts in Cremona. As might be expected from the life work of a craftsman who had unusual concentration, Sacconi's book ranges widely in explaining something very specific. He devotes much s.p.a.ce to a.n.a.lyzing the mathematical principles that guided Stradivari's design of his forms and the more decorative scroll. (The scroll design, he said, combines two early mathematical discoveries: the Archimedian spiral and the spiral of Vignola.) Sacconi gives over page after page to a.n.a.lysis of the various archings and thicknesses in Strad's instruments. He includes a detailed discussion of the master's varnis.h.i.+ng technique, which had become subject to the most fanciful speculation of "secret" techniques and recipes. that Sam Zygmuntowicz had obtained while in violin making school. Though it is possible to get a little stuck when Sacconi's writing starts to care more and more about less and less, there is still more life in those pages than in that room full of artifacts in Cremona. As might be expected from the life work of a craftsman who had unusual concentration, Sacconi's book ranges widely in explaining something very specific. He devotes much s.p.a.ce to a.n.a.lyzing the mathematical principles that guided Stradivari's design of his forms and the more decorative scroll. (The scroll design, he said, combines two early mathematical discoveries: the Archimedian spiral and the spiral of Vignola.) Sacconi gives over page after page to a.n.a.lysis of the various archings and thicknesses in Strad's instruments. He includes a detailed discussion of the master's varnis.h.i.+ng technique, which had become subject to the most fanciful speculation of "secret" techniques and recipes.

Sacconi's conclusion is either surprising, or perfectly obvious, depending on how much stock you put into the various Stradivari myths. The tip might have come from those quote marks around the word Segreti Segreti in the t.i.tle. It turns out that Sacconi had labored all those years, studied all those instruments as carefully as anyone ever could, tested recipes, built impeccable copies, and in the end decided... in the t.i.tle. It turns out that Sacconi had labored all those years, studied all those instruments as carefully as anyone ever could, tested recipes, built impeccable copies, and in the end decided...there were no secrets. Yes, some of the techniques had been "lost" over time. The continuity of tradition stopped when the long chain of master-to-apprentice teaching broke within a generation of Stradivari's death. But, Sacconi decided, Stradivari was no more-or less-than the best that ever was.

"Stradivari was not the trustee or the discoverer of any particular secret," Sacconi wrote in the last paragraph of The "Secrets." The "Secrets." "To insist in such a superficial or closed vision of his personality or his work means, more than anything else, to destroy its value and to reduce him to the level of an empirical though lucky pract.i.tioner or quack. He was Stradivari because his creations were [ "To insist in such a superficial or closed vision of his personality or his work means, more than anything else, to destroy its value and to reduce him to the level of an empirical though lucky pract.i.tioner or quack. He was Stradivari because his creations were [sic] united the knowledge of mathematics and nature, together with a deep spirit of reflection and research, artistic sensibility, exceptional technical ability, experience and tradition."

I got out of the Museo di Stradivari about as quick as I could. Just an hour later I found myself peering into yet another gla.s.s case in Cremona. It had begun to seem that everything everything was in a gla.s.s case in this town. I began to imagine that, sooner or later, if I just kept looking, I'd come across a case with the spirit of Stradivari inside because it certainly was not in the air. The latest gla.s.s case was on the second floor of the Civic Museum, a beautiful salon with real and highly polished marble, located in Cremona's twelfth-century city hall. Inside was a gorgeous yellow-hued fiddle that Stradivari had built in 1715. It had been named the Joachim, for its former owner, Joseph Joachim, one of the greatest virtuosos of all time. Now, since it was the only violin owned by his hometown, it was dubbed the Cremonese. I walked around the case to examine the highly flamed maple of the back and ribs, the distinctive and expertly carved scroll, the sweeping curves of the outline. It was a beautiful fiddle. Perhaps this was as close as I would come to finding the spirit of the master. was in a gla.s.s case in this town. I began to imagine that, sooner or later, if I just kept looking, I'd come across a case with the spirit of Stradivari inside because it certainly was not in the air. The latest gla.s.s case was on the second floor of the Civic Museum, a beautiful salon with real and highly polished marble, located in Cremona's twelfth-century city hall. Inside was a gorgeous yellow-hued fiddle that Stradivari had built in 1715. It had been named the Joachim, for its former owner, Joseph Joachim, one of the greatest virtuosos of all time. Now, since it was the only violin owned by his hometown, it was dubbed the Cremonese. I walked around the case to examine the highly flamed maple of the back and ribs, the distinctive and expertly carved scroll, the sweeping curves of the outline. It was a beautiful fiddle. Perhaps this was as close as I would come to finding the spirit of the master.

Two guards armed with automatic weapons watched carefully as I pointed to the case and tried to explain to Jana how the old guy had joined the purfling corners into the cla.s.sic "b.u.mblebee stingerette."

"Oh yeah," she said, "I see that. That's really cool."

"You do?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Nothing."

We moved slowly again around the gla.s.s box. Displayed this way, the Cremonese was more a work of art than a tool. It finally registered with me why so many violinists are upset when yet another old Italian instrument is purchased by a collector or museum and becomes less and less heard and more and more simply seen. The Cremonese had six companions in identical gla.s.s cases throughout the room. There was a highly decorated fiddle that the original Cremonese master, Andrea Amati, made for Charles IX of France in 1566. There was a later Amati viola, and a violin by Nicol Amati (who taught young Antonio Stradivari). There were two Guarneri fiddles, one by the Giuseppe known as "Giuseppe son of Andrea," and another by his more famous son Giuseppe, known as del Gesu. And last was an elaborately inlaid fiddle that looked remarkably like it had been built by Stradivari, because it was actually an impeccable copy of Strad's 1687 violin known as the h.e.l.lier, crafted by Simone Sacconi. Sacconi built it here in Cremona, right around the time he was being named an honorary citizen of the town.

Each violin was beautiful in its own way, but each, locked in its case, seemed suspended in time and somehow lifeless. I realized that I had struck up an odd and somewhat privileged relations.h.i.+p with violins, particularly for someone who didn't actually play. Lurking around Sam's studio, I'd been able to see and touch and hear a Stradivari and a Guarneri del Gesu. Though I was careful and reverent-always aware of how valuable they were-I'd developed a sense that they were tools made to be used. Like those cla.s.sic cars rolling through the streets of Havana, they'd been ministered to all these decades to keep them alive, so that they could be driven. "I'd love to hear what these fiddles sound like," I told Jana.

Soon our guide Patricia caught up with us. She had been here so many times that the guards who'd been so stern with us (we were the only visitors) relaxed visibly, greeted her warmly, and began to chat and chuckle.

"It's too bad we weren't here earlier," Patricia told me. "They tell me that Maestro Mosconi was in today. He comes and plays the violins to keep them in shape." Toby Faber, in the process of researching his delightful book Stradivari's Genius Stradivari's Genius, had stumbled into this museum just in time for one of Maestro Mosconi's routine concerts. Mosconi is employed by the city to keep its fiddle collection in playing condition. He generally plays one violin each day, meeting the responsibilities of what might just be the cus.h.i.+est government job in the history of government jobs. Though Faber heard wrong notes and thought the playing "faintly plodding," it was also the first time he'd been so near a Stradivari being played.

"There really is something about its tone," Faber wrote later. "Warm and vibrant, it seems to inhabit the room." I remembered that Sam Zygmuntowicz had recounted a similar experience, when the soloist Daniel Heifetz visited the Violin Making School of America in Salt Lake City during Sam's first year there and played some of Bach's Chaconne on his Strad in a small room filled with prospective luthiers. It was Sam's first time hearing one of the old guy's instruments close up. "I'll never forget that sound," Sam told me.

These violins in the Palazzo Communale were beautiful. They were well treated and well guarded. But mostly they were mute, and that seemed kind of sad.

It was late afternoon by the time we left the town hall, and Jana and I both craved coffee and some gelato from a shop we'd discovered across the square. Patricia had other errands to run. Before she left us, she handed me a business card of a restaurant named Alfredo's. "You're invited to a party there tonight."

When we arrived at Alfredo's it was nearing the end of what had obviously been a boisterous aperitivo aperitivo time. The place was packed, and we had to shoulder our way to the bar. The party was celebrating the fifth anniversary of the restaurant, and dinner would be on the house. The owner, Mario, was bartending right then, and when I asked him for Scotch on the rocks he shouted out, "Ah, the Americans are here!" Jana tried to fool him by using her most useful three words of Italian- time. The place was packed, and we had to shoulder our way to the bar. The party was celebrating the fifth anniversary of the restaurant, and dinner would be on the house. The owner, Mario, was bartending right then, and when I asked him for Scotch on the rocks he shouted out, "Ah, the Americans are here!" Jana tried to fool him by using her most useful three words of Italian-Prosecco, per favore-but her Texas accent gave her away.

Soon we were seated at a bunch of small tables that had been pushed together, and Jana ended up next to the violin maker named Marco, who had seemed so cool the other night at Bar Bolero. I tried to get her attention and discreetly suggest she change seats, but it didn't work. Of course, I needn't have worried, because by the time the main course arrived-the most delicious roast pork I have ever eaten-Jana and Marco were new best friends, and he was laughing loudly and dispensing wine in copious amounts.

Patricia brought along a young French woman named Silvie, who had recently arrived from Paris and enrolled in Cremona's violin making school. Silvie had just finished carving her first scroll, and she pulled it from her bag with a mixture of pride and trepidation. She obviously was a long way from thinking, as Sam Zygmuntowicz did, that this task was simply "whacking away at wood." The scroll was unvarnished and seemed very light as it pa.s.sed through my hands for a quick inspection on its way around the table. It was clear that the final judge would be Marco.

The maestro held the scroll up to the lights, turned it several times, brought it back close to his face, and peered at it down the length of his long, cla.s.sic Italian nose. He had reverted to looking stern and serious. Jana glanced nervously between him and Silvie, who, when I looked at her, seemed to be deciding whether to laugh or cry.

Finally, Marco declared, "Bene!" "Bene!" and laughed, sparking an eruption of laughter at the table, which had become a small silent spot in the noisy room. Then he switched to English and said, "Everybody has to carve their first scroll." That brought a spontaneous toast at the table. This seemed like a typical moment in Cremona, which made me realize how untypical it would be anywhere else on earth. Yes indeed, everybody has to carve their first scroll. and laughed, sparking an eruption of laughter at the table, which had become a small silent spot in the noisy room. Then he switched to English and said, "Everybody has to carve their first scroll." That brought a spontaneous toast at the table. This seemed like a typical moment in Cremona, which made me realize how untypical it would be anywhere else on earth. Yes indeed, everybody has to carve their first scroll. "C'ent Anni!" "C'ent Anni!" Marco pa.s.sed the scroll back to Silvie and set out to refill everyone's wine-gla.s.s. Marco pa.s.sed the scroll back to Silvie and set out to refill everyone's wine-gla.s.s.

I started talking to Silvie about Cremona's violin making school. We'd visited one morning-or tried tried to visit-but found there was n.o.body around who could give us permission to go in, but by the same token, there was n.o.body who cared to stop us either. I had found a young Italian student who spoke about as much French as I did, and he invited us to visit a cla.s.sroom workshop. There was no sign of any teachers; a handful of students carved away at fiddles, listened to rock and roll, and smoked cigarettes. Silvie told me she was learning a lot. to visit-but found there was n.o.body around who could give us permission to go in, but by the same token, there was n.o.body who cared to stop us either. I had found a young Italian student who spoke about as much French as I did, and he invited us to visit a cla.s.sroom workshop. There was no sign of any teachers; a handful of students carved away at fiddles, listened to rock and roll, and smoked cigarettes. Silvie told me she was learning a lot.

When next I looked over at Jana, she and Marco were each wearing those things you clip on your head with springs that stick up like antennae. These had s.h.i.+ny red hearts that wiggled and bobbed as they moved their heads. By the time we got up to leave, everyone had taken a turn wearing the bobbing hearts. Before we began to try to weave our way back to what we'd taken to calling "our palazzo," I remembered to ask how much we owed for the wine. Marco shouted, "Niente. Nothing. Va bene Va bene."

"That means, 'Go well,'" he added. Marco stood and raised his gla.s.s toward us. "Come to our workshop tomorrow. Patricia will bring you."

The workshop where we went to meet Marco the next morning could have been created by a set designer. Occupying the ground-floor corner of an old stone building on the via Millazo, it had wood-paneled walls and tall, shuttered windows that looked out on a street scene which, except for the cars, seemed to be a view shared by Stradivari himself. Worktables lined three of the walls, each with an architect's lamp like the one Sam used for illumination and sounding a pitch. The standard tools-planes, gougers, sc.r.a.pers, calipers-were arranged neatly, either lined up near the worktable or hung on the paneled walls. Some wood shavings dotted the tile floors. The place smelled of freshly cut spruce and varnish.

When Patricia had picked us up at our palazzo she told us, "You should be very honored that you are getting an appointment with Maestro Bissolatti." It turned out that Marco was the son of Frances...o...b..ssolatti, who decades before had befriended Simone Sacconi. When we arrived, Marco got up from his workbench and stepped past two other workers to greet us. It was hard not to imagine him wearing two bouncy heart-shaped antennae. He took us over to a bench across the room where a gray-haired man with thick gla.s.ses and a beard was working in a blue shop ap.r.o.n. This was his father. Francesco welcomed us with a friendly formality and went back to work. Marco took us back across the room to his bench and introduced us to the other workers, who were his younger brothers, Maurizio and Vincenzo. Before we would leave the shop that day Marco would give me a handsome book he had written about the tradition of Cremonese craftsmans.h.i.+p called The Genius of Violin Making in Cremona The Genius of Violin Making in Cremona. It includes chapters devoted to the Amatis, the Guarneris, the Stradivaris, the often overlooked Ruggeris and Bergonzis, and, yes, the Bissolattis. It seems Francesco has set himself up as the modern patriarch of Cremonese violin making, a new old guy, with his sons laboring nearby, the start of a new tradition. "Finally," Marco writes in the chapter devoted to his own family, "people have begun to understand that string instruments worthy of the great Cremonese tradition are once again being made in Cremona."

We went from bench to bench and checked the instruments under construction. Maurizio, working on a viola, seemed a bit distracted and annoyed by our being there. Vincenzo was quite shy, but held up an unfinished fiddle for us to admire. In another corner an older man with a full head of gray hair worked with his back to us, and we were not brought to his bench.

"Who's that?" Jana asked.

"He is not here," Marco said. We both looked to Patricia to see if we'd missed something that she could translate for us. She stepped closer and whispered to us, "That is Maestro Mosconi, the man who plays the city's violins. But he doesn't want anyone to know he's here." I didn't quite understand what the big deal was, but I promised I would keep I Segreti di Mosconi I Segreti di Mosconi just as long as I could. just as long as I could.

We turned in the other direction and entered a smaller varnis.h.i.+ng room, where a number of fiddles hung by their scrolls on wires stretched horizontally at a height that kept them just within reach, drying in the muted sunlight. Against one wall was a table nearly covered by jars and bottles filled with viscous varnishes, their colors ranging from deep burgundy to nearly lemony yellow. Jana pointed to a small cot in the corner, covered with a blanket that pictured a polar bear, a blanket for a child. "Who uses that?" she asked. Marco spoke Italian.

"Maestro Bissolatti," Patricia translated, "has a sacred nap each afternoon here with the drying violins." I'd read somewhere of a legend that Stradivari had done the same thing, and some thought he meant to impart his spirit into the fiddles.

Marco shepherded us from the varnish room and through a door into a large and ornate reception area. He went to get a copy of his book, and Jana and I both gasped when we noticed a huge bronze statue looming behind us. It was Stradivari and the apprentice boy, almost the same statue I'd seen in the Piazza Stradivari, except that the figures were rendered more realistically. They actually looked like people.

"How did you get this?" I asked Marco, a little incredulous.

"It was secondi secondi-runner-up in the contest. My father bought it. This one is better. The one they put in the piazza-it looks like people from another planet."

It occurred to me later: that's about the only theory that hasn't been launched to explain Stradivari's greatness.

Finally we came back to Papa Francesco's bench, and he put aside his work to talk for a few minutes. He didn't seem comfortable trying to interpret my English, so Patricia would put my questions into Italian. But then he would answer in English. It seemed a lot was getting lost in that process. For instance, when I asked what it had been like growing up around Cremona and wanting to be a violin maker, he responded in English: "Parma has cheese, we have violins!"

"How about your friend Sacconi, did he get it right?"

"A great man. A genius. Not Stradivari, but as good as anyone else."

"So," I said, "you agree with Sacconi, that there was no secret."