In Cremona, a city dear to the art of lutherie, you can visit the Violin Museum. With its refined, functional design, it is a masterpiece of acoustics and architecture. Not just for music lovers.
Cremona is the city of the violin and of music, where Stradivari was born. The lutherie heritage it preserves is unique in the world: precious bowed instruments by the greatest masters of the classical era, instruments from the subsequent Cremonese and Italian tradition, prize-winning examples from lutherie competitions held from 1976 onwards by the Ente Triennale degli strumenti ad arco and more recently by the Fondazione Stradivari. And more: the precious relics from Antonio Stradivari's workshop (drawings, models, moulds, tools) that survived and were donated to the city of Cremona in 1933 by the luthier Giuseppe Fiorini.
Here, in its natural habitat, sits the Violin Museum, within the Palazzo dell'Arte, which has been completely restored thanks to the Fondazione Arvedi. The Museum, inaugurated in September 2013, tells the story of the origin and history of the violin, the construction methods of bowed instruments and their technical and acoustic characteristics, the histories of the most important families of Cremonese luthiers, and the remarkable and enduring spread of the Cremonese violin throughout the world. There is also a large Auditorium for full concert performances.
The Auditorium is a precious gem, conceived to guarantee the best acoustics in the world. It has a unique "emotional" design whose acoustics were engineered by Yasuhisa Toyota — the auditorium's greatest asset, which has reached such a level of perfection that it can also be used as a recording studio. The grand "sculpture" of the auditorium features a structure of steel blades that define its shape, to which a metal mesh is anchored, serving as the base for the plasterwork. The whole surface is smoothed and subsequently veneered with varnished maple wood, evoking the wood used to make violins. A masterpiece.