The history

The Sabionari guitar is one of the five surviving guitars made by Stradivari. It was built in 1679 in the house-workshop that still stands in Cremona, in the Sant’Agata district, and was the first of a series of three guitars built to the same design in subsequent years (1684 and 1688). It was an innovative and successful design: a guitar with a vibrating string length of no less than 74 cm, at least 7 cm longer than the standard, with the aim of achieving greater resonance and a richer harmonic content. Dating the wood of the soundboard has revealed that it was made by joining two pieces of highly seasoned resonance spruce. One is dated 1616 and the other 1620.

In 1679, the Baroque guitar was at the height of its popularity in Europe. Originally a popular instrument in Spain, it spread to Italy in the early seventeenth century and, by the second half of the century, had reached the most important European courts, including those of France and England. The Sun King, Louis XIV, in Paris, and King Charles II, in London, along with their respective courts, had developed a passion for these instruments, learned to play them, and invited guitarists from Italy, such as Francesco Corbetta, who spent years moving between the two courts and dedicated many of his compositions to the two kings and to several noble courtiers.

A letter dated 1854, written on the occasion of a change of ownership, made it possible to reconstruct the early history of the Sabionari guitar. This instrument was never sold by Stradivari himself. Like some of his violins, it is believed to have been among the instruments he used to showcase his finest craftsmanship to prospective clients. It was his son Paolo who, almost a century later, around 1770, sold it to Giovanni Sabionari, a wealthy merchant from Ferrara. The financial difficulties experienced by Sabionari, which affected his children after his death (around 1790), forced the family to sell the guitar to Filippo Benetti, an art dealer and bookseller from Ferrara.

In 1854, the Sabionari passed into the hands of the landowner Vincenzo Tioli. In 1888, it was exhibited in the Music Pavilion at the International Exhibition in Bologna, organised under the high patronage of the House of Savoy, the Italian royal family, with Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito serving as presidents. This veritable Wunderkammer of music brought together collections of instruments by Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri from across Europe.

The guitar was purchased in Bologna by its current owners in the 1930s from a certain Bagnoli, who shortly beforehand had offered it for sale to the Stradivarian Museum in Cremona. The museum displayed artefacts from Stradivari’s workshop but owned no instruments by Amati, Stradivari or Guarneri, as these had by then become dispersed throughout the world. Interest was focused primarily on bowed string instruments, and it would have seemed unusual for the first instrument to return to Cremona to be a guitar. The sale therefore never went through.

In 1948, the Sabionari was presented to Andrés Segovia, who was visiting Bologna to attend a guitar congress. The great maestro was delighted to examine it and wished to sign the back of the guitar, dedicating it to Stradivari with the inscription: “Two centuries later” (Due secoli più tarde), Bologna, 1948. Photographs and an account of the event have since been discovered.

Research into Stradivari’s guitars took several more decades to gain momentum, but by the late 1990s the first publications began to appear, featuring historical and organological analyses. In 2011, the current owners entrusted the Sabionari to the French expert duo Sinier de Ridder for conservation restoration. During the process, however, it became clear that the guitar could be brought back to playing condition. In 2012, it was used for the world’s first recording of a Stradivari guitar, and since 2013 it has been on display at the Violin Museum in Cremona as part of the Friends of Stradivari collection. In 2018, it was one of 21 Stradivari instruments exhibited at the Tokyo Stradivarius Festival 2018, the largest exhibition of its kind ever organised.

Thanks to the Violin Museum, four recordings, concerts, the dedicated website sabionari.com and the YouTube channel @sabionari, the guitar is now famous worldwide and has accumulated millions of listens.