Carlo Carletti

Violin maker
(1873 – 1941)

Carlo Carletti (1873-1941), patriarch of the family, was born in Pieve di Cento, a small Emilian village the Carlettis always considered themselves Ferrarese from, despite an administrative shift into Bologna province in 1929. Initially a carpenter, furniture restorer, and antiques dealer, he moved into violin making gradually in the late 19th century -- his location put him within half a day's travel ...Read More of Raffaele Fiorini's celebrated workshop, where he likely absorbed the fundamentals in the 1890s, and he was also helped early on by Ettore Soffritti, who supplied him with models and wood. To support his family he made instruments 'in the white' for Leandro Bisiach and Romeo Antoniazzi, and worked briefly for the guitar maker Luigi Mozzani, where he probably trained Claudio Gamberini. His own output splits oddly in two: solid instruments loosely modelled on Stradivari or Guarneri, and a separate, more mysterious body of work -- deliberately antiqued 'fakes' bearing invented or borrowed old labels, among the most creative and hardest-to-detect of their kind, rarely if ever mistaken for a genuine period instrument but often mistaken for real 18th- and 19th-century Italian makers. He married Emilia Vedrani and had three sons, Natale, Orfeo, and Nullo, all of whom he trained; he also took in his nephew Genuzio after his brother Giovanni's early death. Read Less