How can we evoke, with the help of a few admirable scores played in the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Venice, the fabulous history of the making of the viola da braccio initiated in Cremona and Brescia during the second half of the sixteenth century? It was indeed in Cremona that Andrea Amati gave this instrument – it was not yet called the violino – the essential foundations of its making as it would develop until the eighteenth century, first with his descendants– his son Antonio and then his grandson Niccolò –, and then with the famous Guarneri dynasty and finally Antonio Stradivari!

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