Vintage Italian Contessa HG-130 F Hole Archtop Semi acoustic Hollow Body Jazz Guitar

Dating from the 1960's we have a very nice looking Italian made Contessa Archtop Jazz guitar.

When this came in the neck was suffering from Italian Lacquer disease, with it flaking off in significant lumps (I've seen this on Italian Ekos too), aside from which it was in good clean order, and clearly hadn't seen an awful lot of action.

The neck was stripped and refinished in Heritage Cherry Nitro Lacquer to restore it too its former glory. Aside from this there's been a repair to the neck pickups surround, involving a small piece being let in (see photo). Its originial with the exception of the knobs and pickguard.

Cosmetically there are some edge knocks and dings but nothing alarming and certainly not sgnificant given its age. I'm guessing that the seam along the back rear edge has been re-glued at some point (again see photos) and there is a lacquer crack at that point, but its all rock solid.

From a playing point of view the electrics are fully fuctional, the pickups are punchy and quite bright, as you might expect. There's a master volume and a tone control which is wired to act only on the neck pickup (if you know anything about wiring, it's quite a faff to have a tone control not working on one pickup, but I guess it might be the Fender infuence...).  There's some forgiveable fret wear but nothing that hampers a reasonable and comfortable action. It plays with a surprisingly modern feel to the neck and fingerboard, certainly compared to German guitars that I've had from the period.