Cremona, Italy, 2025

The violin on the piano is 60 years older than the United States of America, a Stradivari c. 1727 Vesuvio.

Cremona is all violin, all the time, or at least it feels that way. There are shops focused on making and repairing them, monuments related to them, artistic representations of them in storefront displays, and restaurants.

In a town that was the home of Stradivari, Amati, and Guarneri, what would you expect? As they created the modern violin from a Middle Ages fiddle, the instrument spread throughout the world over the last five centuries. The Violin Museum there, in addition to the details of that development and displays of how they are made, has an enormous collection of them from throughout that history, as well as violas and cellos. The museum includes an auditorium where performances are held using the historical collection because they need to be “exercised.”

On the one full day Barbara and I had there we heard there was to be a performance (with this violin) and quickly decided to attend. It was also the day of the large weekly market–food, clothes, electronics–the stalls flowing from the large central piazza all through the ancient, winding city streets, where Barbara found a pink sweater she has been looking for for a couple of years. That also made it more confusing for us to find the auditorium so we asked several people for directions. The first two people sent us in opposite directions, both wrong.

Continuing to travel under the blessing of Blanche DuBois (“I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers.”), our third “per favore” elicited an effort from a women who, frustrated by her inability to speak English to help us, apologized (really! Like the inadequacy was hers instead of ours), and motioned for us to follow her, leaving her own shopping to lead us to the museum.

The auditorium was designed and built with the same attention to sound quality as the instruments that are played there. After the performance, Barbara (an audiologist) declared it acoustically perfect. For me listening is more complicated. I have to close my eyes or seeing dominates any conversation of my senses. I have no musical education. I do have a hearing loss–age, plus listening to rock and roll with headphones, on LOUD, or sitting in front of large speakers amped up to 11, feeling the thumping of the woofers vibrating through my body. Some of you know what I mean.

Even to me, it was exquisite.

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