This museum has the largest collection of musical instruments of Milan, the second largest in Italy. Most of the items are string instruments from the Monzino and Gallini collection, that is guitars, mandolins, lutes, violins, etc. The museum contains about 800 instruments from the 15th to the 19th century,roughly 600 of them are visible in the exposition.
Here and there, with almost a random distribution, you can find a number of early keyboard instruments that anywhere else would be the most precious part of the collection. A number of them were recently restored by Augusto Bonza, a famous early instrument maker of Turbigo, Milan. He's not the one building my Hass clavichord, by the way.
Since there is little or no information on this collection available on the web, and most of it is incorrect (e.g. the notorious Trasuntinus harpsichord) I prepared these pages to increase the knowledge on this little treasure. The collection unfortunately doesn't offer much more besides the instruments, kept under plastic cover, with large "DON'T TOUCH!" signs placed over the keyboards and with a laconic tag stating useful information like "bentside spinette, unknown maker". The Museum boasts in its brochures that a large effort to scientifically catalog all the items have been undergone. The reason why the results of this effort are kept under safe beats me.
The following is an attempt to augment the visibility of the early keyboard collection. I added here and there some information more specific on the instrument or on its maker. There are also a number of square pianos form the 19th century and a few organs I didn't bother to take pictures of.
All the images are thumbnails; click on them to enlarge the picture.
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Polygonal virginal by Annibale de' Rossi, 16th century. de' Rossi (or Rossi) were a family of instrument makers operating in Milan in the 16th-17th century. Of all the instruments by Annibale (1542-1577) only nine virginals survived. Compared to the more famous Rossi virginal in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and its rich decoration with precious stones, this one looks quite simple and almost understating. |
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An ottavino virginal built in 1643 by an anonymous maker of a Venetian school. The ottavino plays one octave higher than usual, that is like a 4' pitch. |
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Click the image to enlarge |
A small, miniature
harpsichord from Venice, 1st half of the 18th century.
Probably a toy. |
| A bentside spinette by an
unknown Italian maker of the 17th century.
The cover is decorated with pictures of sphynxes and satyrs. |
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Click the image to enlarge |
An Italian polygonal virginal built by an anonymous maker in the 18th century. |
| A bentside spinette, Italy, 18th century, unknown maker. | 
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Click the image to enlarge |
This instrument is rather mysteriously tagged "harpsichord, already claviorgan". It was built in Neaples around the 16th century by an unknown maker. To me this should be the more famous harpsichord rebuild as clavichord. There are no signs of the "pipes undernethe" nor of any mechanism to make an underlying organ play; the action seems to be based on tangents hitting the strings, just like a clavichord. It should be therefore a clavichord with strings running parallel with the keys. I found somewhere that it was built in 1520, although the museum attribution is much more vague. |
| A virginal built in Aquileia
in 1695 by Matteo Cardinali.
The instrument bears Cardinali's signature on the nameboard. |
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Click the image to enlarge |
1695 virginal's view of the nameboard and of the side decoration. |
| An Italian harpsichord built by an unknown maker around the 17th century. | 
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