Stanze per la Musica

In the Ugolani Dati quarter beside Cremona's picture gallery, Stanze per la Musica gathers instruments once owned by collectors, musicians and aristocrats: bowed and plucked strings from leading European workshops of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, including a guitar once played by the singer Lorenzo Pagans, whom Degas painted with it.

Why it matters

Cremona's violin-making story usually ends at Stradivari, but this collection widens the frame across Europe. The instruments on display passed through the hands of celebrated collectors, musicians and aristocrats, and the makers represented — from the Voboam and Fabricatore dynasties to Guadagnini, Panormo and Antonio de Torres — trace how stringed instruments evolved far beyond Cremona's own workshops. The collection is housed within the Ugolani Dati civic cultural complex, alongside Cremona's other museums. The instruments place Cremona's violin heritage within a wider European history of stringed music.

What to notice

The collection balances two families of instruments. The bowed-string collection includes violins, violas, violas d'amore, pochettes — the pocket fiddles of dancing masters — and the rare ghironde. The larger plucked-string collection includes about fifty instruments: guitars, English guitars, mandolins and lutes, showing how domestic music-making changed across two centuries. Builders named on the official page include Voboam, Fabricatore, Guadagnini, Pons, Panormo and Stauffer, alongside René Lacôte, Nicolas Grobert and Antonio de Torres, the latter central to the modern classical guitar; Fedele Barnia, Gérard Deleplanque and Jean-Nicolas Lambert complete the page's roll of builders. The piece with the best-documented story is a guitar by the French maker Aubry-Maire once owned by the Spanish singer Lorenzo Pagans, who appears playing it in a painting by Edgar Degas — a rare case of an instrument in a case being independently depicted in a major artwork.

Context and history

The collection belongs to Cremona's civic museum system and occupies rooms within the Ugolani Dati cultural complex shared with the Pinacoteca of the Museo Civico Ala Ponzone. Its character was shaped by acquisition from famous collectors, performers and aristocratic households, which is why provenance, not just maker, defines the display. The holdings document the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the period when guitar and mandolin culture swept European salons and when luthier dynasties in France, Spain and Italy developed parallel lineages to Cremona's own violin tradition. Within a city whose lutherie is UNESCO-recognized intangible heritage, the museum deliberately adds the wider European chapter to the local one.