Carlo Tononi 1729 This great instrument is one of the finest of the violins that Carlo Tononi made towards the end of his life to a new design of his own, as he proudly proclaims on its label. A typical Carlo Tononi label from the late 1720s in Venice. Carlo Tononi 1715 violin table from just before he left Bologna for Venice. Tononi Records is named after Carlo Tononi, the great Italian violin maker, who was born in Bologna ten years before Bach was born in Eisenach in Thuringia. This violin, pictured here and in the previous illustration, is the instrument that was used by Benedict Cruft for this recording. It was made by Carlo Tononi in Bologna around the year 1715. Carlo Annibale Tononi, baptised on the 14th September 1675, was the son of Johannes Tononi, and trained and worked with him in the Tononi family workshop in Bologna until his father's death in 1713. Bologna in the late C17th was a great centre of string playing, being Arcangelo Corelli's home town, but by the second decade of the C18th, Venice had become a much more important centre both for music and for string instrument making, and sometime between 1713 and 1716 Carlo Tononi moved to Venice, where he became one of the foremost makers of the new Venetian School. Shortly before he died in 1730 he added a codicil to the will he had drawn up the previous month, asking that one of his 'cellos be sold to pay for masses to be said for his soul. On the 21st April 1730, his executors published his will after his death.