Cremona

The scene in this photo is what I was looking at when I realized I really liked Cremona. It's a park in the middle of the city. I liked the way the light filtered throught the trees. It might have also helped that I was eating lunch.

We'd stopped in Cremona as a side trip on our way from the Garfagnana region to Lake Como. We thought that since the city was famous for its violins, we'd see if anyone knew anything about CZ's violin. It's old, but no one knows who made it or where. It's kind of a fun mystery.

So we went straight to the Stradivarius Museum. We meant to go in, but we didn't get that far. We asked the lady behind the front desk if she knew of any shops where someone might be able to help us with our violin. She recommended someone right away, and American who restored the museum's violins.

The shop's address was only a couple of blocks from the museum, so we went there right away, met Mr. Carlson, left the violin with him, and went to get some lunch and have a look around.

You'll notice that there's a sort of bicycle motif in these photos and also in other ones throughout the trip. This is partly because Italy is so bicycle-friendly, and Cremona, being flat, was especially so. But it's also just because I liked all the different kinds of bikes. I think this rubber ducky one, above, was my all-time favorite, though. While we were having lunch, I also saw a baby squeezing a rubber ducky on his dad's bike. (Not the one above!)

When we returned to the violin shop, Mr. Carlson has some interesting things to say. First of all, our violin likely wasn't Florentine, as we had thought, but French. He gave us the name of a maker whose violins were similar, and an approximate year.

He told us the likely reason for the hole in the back of the scroll was not for a processional, as we had been told, but either just to hang it up, or because strings used to be really long and violinists would let the extra length poke out the back (somehow--I never quite understood completely).

He also said that the f-holes hadn't been so much repaired as purposely recut. The French maker's violins had a thin sound, which someone had tried to fix. And since most violins are identified by the cut of the f-holes, we had lost a big clue as to the maker. The conclusion: Our violin had a good sound and was probably worth what we paid for it, but it wasn't like we were sitting on a winning lottery ticket--an unidentified violin by a famous maker. Which was fine with us, because we bought it for CZ to play.

We got to talking about what it was like to be an American living in Italy year-round. Mr. Carlson said that Cremona was a beautiful city, but it had an unfortunate tendency to stay foggy and rainy in the winter, and to retain pollution, because of its location in the Po valley. "If Cremona were in Tuscany, everyone would be here!" So I guess Mr. Carlson choose his city for much the same reason as we chose our violin: For his own musical enjoyment.