Parlez-vous Italien? Violin Making in Turin Drew on Both French and Italian Traditions

By Philip J. Kass | From the July/August 2025 issue of Strings

Turin, the capital of the Italian region of Piedmont, has an enviable reputation for high-tech manufacturing, such as automobiles, and fabulous cuisine. It remains the fourth largest city in Italy. That distinction is actually relatively recent and owes a lot to its former ruling family, the House of Savoy, whose fortunes had a significant influence on the area’s violin making tradition. And Turin was significantly smaller then, in its heyday, than it is now.

The Savoys, the longest reigning of all European ruling families, once controlled an area that included the province of Savoie in France, along with Nice and Grenoble. It was bisected by the French Alps, which made each side potentially vulnerable to attack. This made it an attractive catch for the neighbors, primarily the French. For centuries, the ruling dukes fended off attempts by almost all the French kings to annex their territory. At one time, in the mid-1600s, the ruling duke married the daughter of King Henry IV. When, shortly afterward, the unfortunate duke died, it was a golden opportunity for such a land grab, but the duchess was no more interested in being ruled by her father than by her husband. For the next 40 years, she ruled the country herself, setting up a court that rivaled those back home in Paris. 

Later, during the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the French and Austrians fought one another, but with Piedmont stuck in the middle between them. Periodic and judicious switches in alliances resulted in Savoy coming out on the winning side, and they were granted a kingdom through the annexation of Sardinia. And it was to Sardinia that the King of Sardinia fled when Turin finally did get taken over, in 1796, when the armies of Napoleon conquered it, and until the French exited (in 1814), it was the 27th Department of France.

Which is to say that Piedmont, unlike any other province of Italy, has a decidedly French character—a blending, if you will, of France and Italy, which has defined it to this day. This proved particularly significant during the Napoleonic occupation, because Napoleon exported to them all the political and governmental structures that the revolution instilled, including the musical conservatory system. This meant that there was not just a renewed encouragement of music, it meant that a generation of music students needed instruments, and that meant a captive market for the musical instrument makers of Mirecourt. An early capture of this ripe fruit came with the Lété family, music merchants par excellence, whose far-flung empire included Mirecourt, Paris, Brussels, and even, for a time, New York City. Since the annexation, they were now settling in France, and so they imported not just the instruments but also the personnel to make them. 

But in 1814, Napoleon retreated, the Savoy King of Sardinia returned, and the French became foreigners again. Nicolas Lété spent at least part of his time in Genoa, seeking a residency passport, but his organization lost energy after his death in 1819. Everyone on his staff was a foreigner in Turin. 

Well, all but one man.

Giovanni Francesco Pressenda, or Francesco, as his friends called him, was born in the village of Lequio Berria, far to the south, in a territory called the Langhe, in 1777. He was from a family of contadini, people who worked the soil, and this appeared to be his destiny. However, sometime after 1802, he moved north with his wife to the town of Carmagnola, where he was a day laborer, and finally, after 1814, to Turin itself, where he seems to have found work in Lété’s establishment. On Lété’s death, he was the only native-born Piedmontese in the firm and seems to have rather quickly turned it into his own endeavor. 

Starting in the early 1820s, he set up a shop in the eastern end of town. He seems to have had the gift of friendships, because when the new musical figures in town, celebrated musicians such as Giovanni Battista Polledro and Giuseppe Ghébart, who ran the various royal ensembles, made his acquaintance, they immediately liked his instruments, became clients, and furthermore promoted his work, so that by the end of the decade he was the leading violin maker in town. Pressenda was productive and prolific, thanks to his adoption of the French methods he would have encountered in the Lété workshop. They contributed very decidedly to the final results that he achieved.

What was the state of violin making in Turin at the time? At best, it was moribund, at worst, extinct. G.B. Guadagnini, on his arrival in 1771, may well have encountered a marketplace that had no luthiers at all. When he died in 1786, he had been the only active maker in town. But by the 1780s, it appears that the market for bowed strings was probably more than satisfied with used goods. The luthiers in Genoa and Turin both switched over to guitars and mandolins, including Guadagnini’s two sons, Gaetano and Carlo, and by the 1810s almost no bowed strings were being built there except for what came out of the French workshops. 

But their method was quite different. The earlier Turin makers had built their instruments up from the back, fitting the ribs into channels cut into the inner surfaces, which was a method imported from the Franco-Flemish instruments used at court as well as the methodology of the many lute builders then sojourning in Italy. Guadagnini had used an internal mold in the Lombard manner, and for a time was unique in the town in that regard. The French, meanwhile, had mostly adopted an external form which guaranteed that the rib structures were almost entirely interchangeable. Their models were very much based on Stradivari, but in a more rigid manner that echoed what Mirecourt had drawn from Lupot’s example in Paris. Scroll models and f-hole models allowed a measure of individuality, but only according to training and the whims of the master. After all, the workmen were building the master’s instruments, and they needed to have a family resemblance.

In this regard, Pressenda was taking a page out of Lupot’s book and most certainly followed the format used by J.B. Vuillaume in coming years. The craftsmen could do the rough work, but only up to a point: Pressenda had chosen the woods and the varnish, and he would finish the scrolls and edges, cut the soundholes, and fit the purfling using his own preferred models, pattern, and materials. As a result, his work always looked uniquely his, and quite different from that of his employees. This made his work instantly recognizable. And he succeeded commercially in large measure because his instruments not only looked good, they sounded good, an opinion that has been shared by generations of musicians ever since. In the arching, where it counted, he chose a model inspired by Cremona but reached by way of Paris.

Pressenda managed to capture the essence of his country—a little bit French, a little bit Italian—in his work. The stiffness of Mirecourt was softened by a flow and grace that was his particular strength, the beauty of the varnish and woods, and his personal design of soundhole, a bit of a blend between Stradivari and Guarneri, stylish and effective. This personal style became the standard for Turin and, in many respects, for the rest of the peninsula, for by the 1830s there were hardly any craftsmen, in Piedmont or elsewhere, whose work could rival what came from his shop. Indeed, by the 1830s even Gaetano Guadagnini had followed in Pressenda’s footsteps, employing French methods and perhaps even some of the same workmen to create his own personal creations, and thereafter it became the norm for luthiers in Turin to work in this way.

Not all of Pressenda’s employees’ hands are hidden under his handiwork, however, and for a reason. In 1837, Pressenda, then 60, had some sort of serious medical issue, serious enough for him to write his last will. Perhaps as a result, starting in 1838, differences in the work coming from Pressenda’s shop started to emerge. It is likely that some of the tasks he could no longer accomplish, and so he needed the employees to become more involved in the finish.

As a result, we see differences in the in-struments that left his shop, and the hands that are most obvious are those of Giuseppe Rocca and Pierre Pacherele. Rocca had just been through his own medical hardships and was no doubt glad to have the work. Pacherele, who was married to one of the daughters of the premiere French maker-dealer in town, Nicolas Denis, had worked for Pressenda as early as the 1820s. In 1839, he had an opportunity to take control of a shop across the mountains in Nice; thereafter he rarely seems to have come to Turin and perhaps was shipping most of his production. 

By the end of the 1840s, Pressenda had slowed down considerably: I know of a violin of 1849, and after that, just a cello, dated 1854, the year of his death, and made in a style quite different from every other cello known from his hand. My suspicion is that this is the work of Teobaldo Rinaldi, a childhood friend of Rocca’s back in Alba, who had moved to Turin and thereafter became a violin maker. 

This individual would prove to be the next step toward the future. Rinaldi’s daughter married another man from that region, Benedetto Gioffredo, and by taking the name Rinaldi, Gioffredo was allowed to take over that business, continuing it well into the 1880s. He was responsible for much of what we know about Pressenda, whose successor he could justly claim to be, and most accounts of Pressenda’s life were based upon the essay he wrote at the time of the Vienna Exposition of 1873. Gioffredo and Antonio Guadagnini, Gaetano’s son, also employed many of the finest makers of the next generation, such as the Melegaris, Marchetti, Oddone, and Marengo Rinaldi, extending this style into the 20th century and our own times.