Egisto Bontempi’s accordion workshop.

Bontempi began as an accordion workshop. Its founder, Egisto Bontempi, was born in Castelfidardo on 31 July 1902 and in 1937 opened an accordion factory called “La Fisarmonica” in the Palazzo Marefoschi at Potenza Picena, a town near the coast of the Marche, when he was 35. His first partner was Archimede Mancini, according to I Santesi, a local-history site. Today the name is used by iCom, an Ancona company, for toy and children’s instruments. The current trademark owner says that the Bontempi brand “was born thanks to Bontempi S.p.A. in 1937.”

The business moved to a new plant on Viale Don Bosco in Potenza Picena in the early 1960s. Egisto’s children were Paolo and Anna; it was Paolo Bontempi, an engineer, who changed the firm. The newspaper Il Resto del Carlino, in its obituary of him in December 2025, said he turned his father’s accordion workshop into an international maker of toy musical instruments.

Egisto Bontempi died at Potenza Picena on 17 December 1993. Paolo died at Montelupone on 23 December 2025, aged 93.

Toy keyboards, Farfisa and a sale.

Under Paolo, Bontempi became a large maker of children’s instruments: toy keyboards, wind and percussion toys, and chord organs, in which a motor blows air across free reeds, as in an accordion. It published teaching books under the “Bontempi method” name and, according to the Carlino, held licences from Disney, Warner and Barbie and employed about 1,000 people in the 1970s and 1980s, with plants in Italy, including Abruzzo, and in Canada. A trade-union account says its Martinsicuro plant covered 32,000 square metres and had more than 400 workers at its peak. Paolo received the Mugellini Prize in 2023, the newspaper reported.

In October 1984 Paolo Bontempi bought Farfisa, the district’s great organ maker, according to the Italian encyclopaedia Treccani. Farfisa’s intercom business was split off in 1992, and Treccani says its musical-instrument division was liquidated in 2003.

Farfisa had already shrunk by then. Claudio Capponi puts its peak workforce at about 2,100; the American group Lear Siegler took a majority stake in 1965, and its Castelfidardo plant closed in July 1980. Sources differ on when the instrument business finally ended — Capponi gives 1998, Treccani 2003 — so we give both.

The company itself did not survive. Bontempi entered a liquidating creditors’ arrangement in January 2014, and in February 2015 its trademark was sold to iCom, a company in Ancona, for about €1 million, against a plan valuation of about €2 million, according to Il Centro; a bid from Proel was rejected, and the company then had 94 employees. The judge overseeing the sale was Giovanni Cirillo, the paper reported. iCom was created by a former Bontempi administrator, Andrea Ariola. Thirty-four former workers formed a cooperative, Cooperativa Industria Abruzzo, which makes about 50,000 toy wind and percussion instruments a month.

From accordions to electronics.

The accordion boom on Italy’s Adriatic coast ended quickly. Italian Wikipedia, citing the national business-archive portal, records that accordion exports fell by about half between 1952 and 1962; an analysis by Franco Foschi, quoted in a 2012 presentation by the guitar maker EKO, estimated that the trade had employed at least 13,000 people while it lasted.

The district’s answer was to change instruments: in the late 1950s and 1960s, several accordion firms, and people who had worked for them, turned to electric guitars and electronic organs. Italian Wikipedia credits the guitar maker EKO with lifting Italy’s share of world guitar exports from 0.8 per cent in 1956 to 12 per cent in 1965.

Electronics followed. Farfisa, formed in 1946 from three accordion firms, made its first electronic accordions in 1962 and its Compact organs from 1964; the Castelfidardo collector Claudio Capponi puts its workforce at about 1,800 in 1963. Crumar, founded around 1970–71 by Mario Crucianelli of the accordion family, grew to about 300 staff, according to an enthusiast history based on interviews with former engineers, before it stopped trading in 1986 or 1987 — sources differ.

The industrial district of Recanati, Osimo and Castelfidardo, which covers fourteen comuni, went into crisis again at the end of the 1970s, Italian Wikipedia says, under Asian competition, and diversified into lighting, photovoltaics and telecommunications. Further north, in Romagna, the Galanti family of Mondaino made a parallel journey from accordions to organs and keyboards.

The history is kept in small places. Recanati opened a guitar museum named after EKO’s founder, Oliviero Pigini, on 22 May 2004; Castelfidardo’s international accordion museum opened in 1981; and an annual Farfisa Day, organised by Capponi’s cultural association, shows historic instruments in Castelfidardo — its fourteenth edition was held in September 2025.

Bontempi made that journey in an unexpected direction: from accordions not to professional electronics but to toy keyboards for children.

An accordion family’s name on a child’s first keyboard.

Bontempi’s brand is aimed at children: toy instruments, licensed characters and teaching books under the family name. Behind it is a family accordion business, and inside its chord organs, a motor-blown reed — the accordion’s sound in a toy. It did not invent the keyboard, and we do not say so.

Today’s Bontempi is a trademark held by a trading company. iCom describes itself as a commercial company. It says that part of the range is made by the workers’ cooperative with a “Made in Italy” label, and that “the rest of the production takes place through selected factories … in some Chinese districts,” with a Hong Kong subsidiary, iCom Toys Ltd. iCom also sells instruments under the Farfisa name — a digital piano, the FP 100, keyboards such as the FK 610 and FK 370, microphones and headphones, rather than reissued organs — and in February 2025 presented Farfisa at Casa Bontempi in Sanremo, where the musician Andy of Bluvertigo played an original Compact Duo organ.

For a design guide, Bontempi shows a brand that found a new audience. Compare Farfisa, which it owned, and EKO, another Marche firm that left the accordion. For this guide we use a toy red and a yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no instrument or logo is reproduced.

Keep Bontempi’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.