Back in junior high school, my orchestra teacher brought an old violin that one of our Nashville Symphony members was selling. Of all the kids in the class, he offered it to me to play on for awhile, and asked me to talk to my parents about the possibility of buying it for me. I had a decent German made violin already, and I wondered why he chose me, a second violinist, and not the better players like the concert master, or first chair, first violinist, and he simply told me, "You deserve a nice violin, and I thought it just seemed to suit you." I was touched!

I opened the case, and there was this lovely old blonde, almost wheat coloured Italian made fiddle, made around 1740's (? 17-something-or-other) narrower at the top and middle than my German, so much so that it rattled a bit in the modern violin case without padding. It had all rosewood fittings, not ebony, and a triangular shaped tail piece, and narry a blemish or scratch! I wish i had paid attention to the label with the maker- I cannot remember! The sound was phenomenal! My daddy was a long-haul truck driver, and sadly the symphony member's appraisals of the instrument kept increasing. I played on it for three months, obviously attached to it. It was was too expensive for my parents to afford, and my dad cried (literally) when he told me he couldn't get it for me, and I cried when I had to return it- I got a big hug from my orchestra teacher. 

I still think of that Italian fiddle, and wonder what became of it. My German violin sounded like "green wood" after that, and though I love my Romanian violin I have now, I am always on the look out for an old, blonde coloured, rosewood fitted Italian fiddle (: