Cremona
Historic Centre Of Cremona, Home Of The Amati, Guarneri And Stradivari Workshops, With Violin Making Inscribed On The UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List In 2012 · Cremona, Lombardy
Amati, Guarneri and Stradivari all worked in this one small Lombard town within about a hundred and fifty years of each other, and it never stopped: there are still something like a hundred and fifty working violin workshops here, most of them one person at a bench, and the craft is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list. The Museo del Violino holds a handful of instruments by all three families in a purpose-built acoustic room, and rather than leave them silent it employs musicians to play one every day, which is the single best hour in the town. Around that is a proper Po plain city with a cathedral square almost untouched, a baptistery, and the Torrazzo, the tallest historic brick bell tower in Europe at a hundred and twelve metres, climbed by five hundred and two steps with an astronomical clock on the way up. It is an hour from Milan and almost nobody goes, which is the whole opportunity: check the audition times first and build the day around them.
Piazza del Comune, Cremona, Lombardy, 26100, Italy
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The structure: the Museo del Violino opens Tuesday to Sunday with a last admission before closing, and THE DAILY AUDITION RUNS AT FIXED TIMES on a separate small ticket that can sell out. The Torrazzo keeps its own seasonal hours with a weekly closure and shuts in bad weather. The cathedral opens daily and free with a midday interval. The baptistery keeps museum hours. Workshops run ordinary trade hours and many shut in August. Confirm the audition first.