Pietro Sgarabotto

Violin maker
(1903 – 1990)

Pietro Sgarabotto (1903–1990) originally trained as a violinist and violist before following his father, Gaetano Sgarabotto, into making. His career was unusually itinerant even by the standards of the trade: after beginning in Milan he worked in Vicenza for eleven years, Parma for eighteen, and Brescia for eleven, shuttling between the three cities as many as eight times over his working life — ...Read More a restlessness some contemporaries put down to a genuinely searching character, and others, less charitably, to erratic professional habits (a rival maker, Gaetano Pollastri, was scathing about both father and son in private correspondence of the 1950s). In 1947 he was invited to teach at the Cremona violin-making school, a post that curtailed his own output but placed him at the centre of the school's postwar revival; he remained there until 1973. Among his more distinctive work are a series of intentionally rough, unantiqued copies made in emulation of Stefano Scarampella's style — technically accomplished but deliberately unpolished, capturing something of Scarampella's spirit without his idiosyncratic arching or purfling. Read Less

Price History

- The auction record for this maker is $47,200 in Mar 2026, for a cello.
- 40 auction price results.

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Sgarabotto family tree

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