There are barely more than four hundred people living in Quarna Sotto, a small mountain village above Lake Orta, and yet for more than a century musicians, orchestras, and instrument dealers from around the world have known its name. Not because of a famous conservatory, or a major opera house, but because generations of craftsmen here learned how to make wind instruments with extraordinary precision.
Saxophones, clarinets, flutes, brass instruments: for decades, they came out of workshops scattered along narrow streets in one of the most unlikely manufacturing districts in Italy. The story began in the nineteenth century, when several young men from the village left for Milan to learn the trade of instrument making.
