Annibalotto Fagnola

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Baptised Annibale Domenico Luigi Maria Fagnola, born in Turin on 11 May 1910, he picked up the nickname "Annibalotto" from his own family simply to tell him apart from his uncle and namesake — the celebrated Turin maker Annibale Fagnola. His father Marcello was one of Annibale's brothers, and around 1925–26 the younger Annibalotto ...Read More joined his uncle's workshop, mainly to please his father rather than out of any calling of his own; Marcello himself worked there from time to time too. Whatever his motivation, he picked up the craft quickly and signed a handful of instruments during these years, developing real technical skill even while working in the shadow of one of the finest makers of his generation.

Military service interrupted whatever momentum he'd built: drafted in 1930, he served in Venice until March 1933, then was recalled for another year and more from September 1935. By the time he returned to civilian life, lutherie seems to have slipped to the margins of his interests — he probably still visited his uncle's shop, but no longer with any regularity. When Annibale died in 1939, Annibalotto inherited the entire contents of the workshop and tried, with his father's help, to carry the business forward — an effort undone almost immediately by the outbreak of the Second World War. His own career as a maker, brief and irregular even at its best, effectively ended around this point. He went on to work as a nurse and later as an administrative employee at the Collegno hospital near Turin, made no further instruments, and lost most of what remained of his uncle's material across several moves. He died on 17 December 1984.

He signed too few instruments to have shaped Turin lutherie in any real way, but as Annibale's sole heir his name appears in most accounts of the workshop regardless. One surviving violin, made when he was just eighteen and labelled "FAGNOLA NEPOS fecit Torino Anno 1928" ("made by Fagnola's nephew"), shows real ability for his age — evidence enough, in the author's view, that circumstance rather than talent was what kept him from a serious career of his own. Read Less

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