From October 2nd to 4th, CremonaFiere and the Ala Ponzone Civic Museum will host the journey of an instrument between Italy and France.
Cremona, August 4, 2026 – There is one guitar in the world that Edgar Degas captured on canvas. It is 1871, Paris, and in the painting, the artist’s father listens to the Spanish singer Lorenzo Pagans play an instrument built in Mirecourt, a small French town that was the European capital of serial violin making in the 19th century. That guitar, an Aubry-Maire dating to around 1860, will be on display in Cremona from October 2 to 4, 2026, as part of the Cremona Musica Expo & Festival, within the exhibition “The 19th-Century Guitar: Turin, Mirecourt, Paris,” curated by Fausto Cacciatori of the Cremona Violin Museum. It is perhaps the most emblematic object in a story that this exhibition tells so comprehensively for the first time: how the modern guitar was born from an extraordinary exchange between artisans, musicians, and distant cities, and why that 19th-century moment is the root of everything we call music today.
The exhibition will be held in two locations: the first in Pavilion 1 of the Acoustic Guitar Village, featuring eleven exceptional instruments—guitars by Carlo Guadagnini, Gaetano II Guadagnini, René Lacôte, Enrico Marchetti, Nicolao Denis, and an extremely rare lyre-guitar by Pons fils from 1807—revealing the flourishing of guitar making between Turin, Paris, and Mirecourt. The second location is in the Museo Civico Ala Ponzone, specifically in the “Music Rooms,” with another sixteen instruments from the historic Carlo Alberto Carutti collection, some attributed to the most illustrious masters of the era. In all, some thirty guitars have never been seen together before.
The story behind these instruments is the story of the guitar as we know it. During the 19th century, the ancient five-string instrument evolved into the modern six-string guitar, through an ongoing dialogue between Piedmontese and French artisans, and Italian guitarists such as Carulli, Molino, and Gragnani, who dictated the new canons of virtuosity from Paris. The annexation of Piedmont to France in 1802 had opened a channel of mutual influence between Turin and Paris, and Mirecourt completed the picture with a widespread production that brought the Romantic guitar to salons across Europe. It is from that tradition that the instrument was born that, a hundred years later, would change the music of the 20th century.
On Saturday, October 3, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., the Acoustic Guitar Village hosts a panel discussion with international speakers: Françoise de Ridder and Daniel Sinier will offer a French perspective on “guitare romantique” between Paris and Mirecourt, while Lorenzo Frignani will explore the mutual influences between the Piedmontese and French schools. Bob Van de Kerckhove will explore the guitar as a hybrid object in 19th-century Europe, Jacopo Uberti will recount the restoration of an 1827 Lacôte, and finally Francesco Molmenti will reconstruct the relationship between guitarists Carulli and Molino and the builders of their time. At 7 pm, in the Civic Museum’s Music Rooms, two instruments will be played again after nearly two centuries: Francesco Molmenti will perform a program on the Aubry-Maire from Degas’s painting, and Massimiliano Filippini will play a Carlo Guadagnini instrument from 1812, in a concert that is also an experiment: listening to the sound of these instruments in the very rooms where they are kept.
The exhibition is one of the highlights of Cremona Musica Expo & Festival 2026, the annual event that transforms Cremona into the world capital of music and musical instruments, an ecosystem like no other in the world, where the city’s great violin-making tradition dialogues with electric violin making, new audio technologies, rock, and chamber music.
