Museo dello Strumento Musicale

At the Accademia delle Arti Gerundia near Lodi's station, a museum of sound runs on participation rather than hush. More than 500 instruments from every continent fill five ground-floor halls, arranged by the classic Hornbostel-Sachs families, and includes a lutherie workshop devoted to violin construction.

Why it matters

Lodi's museum scene is strong on sacred art and science, but this is its museum of making music. The collection is didactic in the best sense — organised by the 1914 Hornbostel-Sachs classification into cordophones, aerophones, idiophones, membranophones and mechanical-electric instruments — so a walk through the halls doubles as a course in how humanity has produced sound. The museum also bridges domains that rarely meet: archaeological finds with musical subjects from the Roman Empire and Chinese dynasties share the building with a 1962 Recordorama jukebox described as the last working example in Italy, plus gramophones, wire and tape recorders and a valve radio.

What to notice

The museum's emblem is a sculpture of a faun playing the double aulos of ancient Greece, which sets the tone of reaching back to music's origins. The archaeological section shows how depictions of instruments preserve evidence when the instruments themselves do not. The organology halls group string, wind and percussion instruments according to the classification. The sound-reproduction corner rewards close attention — a galena radio, a gramophone, wire and tape recorders and a turntable lined up as one technological lineage. Around several thousand vinyl records await cataloguing for listening sessions, and the lutherie workshop displays the stages and tools of violin construction. The collection's musical character is also expressed through performances.

Context and history

The museum belongs to the Accademia delle Arti Gerundia, a Lodi musical association founded in 1976 whose activities run from music and dance courses to polyphonic choir and youth jazz orchestras; the museum and its musicology centre form the association's flagship. It is directed by Pietro Farina, whom the municipality credits with curating the collection with notable care, and it operates within the Sistema Museale Lodigiano and the national Piccoli Musei network, with sponsorship from the city and province of Lodi. Its home is a historic building erected by Royal Decree in 1896 near the railway station. The museum is part of the Sistema Museale Lodigiano and the national Piccoli Musei network.