:: If you are still curious

  To call our instruments after the names of the ancient masters is certainly a practical way to generalize some constructional  features,  but it can also be a label with a not quite clearly defined content, requiring a couple of deeper thoughts. It was almost  always chance  that determined which instruments should survive, very often on aesthetic and/or commercial grounds - which  at least partly explains  the disproportion existing today between “leuti ordinarii” and “leuti de pretio”, as we read in the ancient  sources. But the latter  represent, in fact, the less significant part of the whole historical production. On the other hand, the  fact alone of being ancient is no  guarantee that these instruments are the very best ones worth reproducing. Lutes have  always been specialized 'working tools'  and if we do not try and understand and, as far as possible, reproduce the  historical context in which they were employed, we risk  creating a deformed perspective of the historical facts. True enough,  this issue invests more directly other categories of specialists, but  indirectly regards us lutemakers, too. Only a limited number  out of the many surviving instruments has been studied in depth  and we  often possess only more or less accurate information  about their outer physical aspect. Only in a few cases X-rays exist,  which can give  us a reasonably accurate insight of the  inner details. The number of instruments that have actually been opened and  accurately  described in their crucial features and  measurements is, on the other hand, rather limited. Even when we have determined  the original  state of all the components  we can not always realize true copies, especially where the original sizes are concerned,  since they often do not  fit modern pitch  standards (or musicians’ idiosyncrasies), and we often have to reduce the original dimensions,  with no negligible  consequences in terms of  sound.
  A chapter on its own deserves the question of historical strings, which were the one single factor which  affected the  whole  constructional concept, whether we are conscious of it or not.
  If these considerations help partly justify a certain reluctance of mine to give 'names' to my instruments, they aim, above all, at  making it clear that modern instruments owe their sound and character much less to what the old masters' names were than to how each of us interprets the information that original instruments can offer us.

  Vivi lieto.

 :: Biography

  Grown up on the Slovenian coast of Istra, in simple and serene sorrundings where active music making played an important  role, I  received my first musical fundaments at the age of eight, when I started to learn the clarinet. At ten-and-a half I must  move to Italy, in the Florentine province, where music making did not go much further than ringing the doorbell. Not to be discouraged, and working in the  shreds of time stolen from scholastic learning, I bought my first guitar and at sixteen started  to learn the classical guitar as an  autodidact, a passion which should accompany me for the next twenty years. With  twentytwo years of age, and a completely useless  diploma in economics and accounting in the wastepaper bin, I started to  roam around the world, carrying an Irish tinwhistle in my  pocket when the guitar became too cumbersome. Between Manchester and Rome I had the good luck of learning the fundaments of  woodworking from an Irish carpenter and, more or  less at the same time, began to discover the modern guitar trascriptions of music originally written for the lute. Within a short time, lute making - at first just a passionate hobby - became the natural  development of such a fortunate coincidence. Lute making as a hobby was the best precondition for leisurely and serious study and  research on original instruments from various collections and for experimenting with models and materials, free from marketing  pressure. The result was that, when hobby finally turned to profession at the beginning of the 80s, my instruments were satisfactory enough to grant steady work ever since. After good ten years activity in Rome I moved to Bremen, only to close the circle for good, after seventeen fruitful years, moving back to Dekani, on the Slovenian coast, in the summer of 2009.

 My instruments are regularly to be heard in concert, and in many recordings in the hands of artists like Paul O'Dette, Stephen Stubbs, Andrea  Damiani, Lee  Santana, Lynda Sayce, Stephen Player and Pascale Boquet, among many others.
One particular satisfaction is having my own version of the 11 course lute by Andreas Berr (Vienna, 1694), which is exposed in the Ptuj museum in Slovenia, in the shadow of the original by the great master, which served as model and inspiration.