Very rare and beautiful bowl back mandolin manufactured in Italy in 1972! Instrument shows very little wear - especially for a vintage / antique musical instrument that’s 50 years old! Please note that there is a split on the bowl as well as some wood lifting and missing. This is nothing that your competent luthier can repair.
From the web regarding Cantanio Carmelo:
Carmelo Catania was born in Catania in 1908, and following his propensity for violin making, very young he entered the shop at the Finocchiaro mandolin. He learned early enough that at 17 he built his first harp guitar, considered at the time the point of arrival of artistic maturity. Realizing that no one in Catania can help him to improve his education, at 18 he leaves for Naples and goes to work at the laboratory of Calacus, epigone together with the Pomace of the Neapolitan school. / At the age of 20 he returns to Catania and begins to work on his own, even if he started on behalf of third parties, and builds a second and more elaborate harp guitar whose image he will use as a trademark of his company. / In 1936 he registered his company at the Catania Chamber of Commerce and started selling under his own name.] "
The great Italian singer-songwriter Francesco Guccini once told his biographer, “It was a Carmelo Catania, ... for part of his career Guccini was a proud owner of a guitar made by Carmelo Catania (1908-1970), a Sicilian luthier who had built his first string instrument at the young age of seventeen. / Catania had started working on mandolins, learning the ropes of his trade very early in life in Naples: he gleaned the secrets of the Neapolitan school of string instrument making and repair, and founded his own company in 1936. After the Second World War, the “Primaria Fabbrica di strumenti musicali a corda Carmelo Catania” recorded a sharp increase in business, peaking at 10,000 instruments sold a year, ranging from the professional to the beginner.”
Add this amazing piece of musical history to your collection today!
