A craftsman of both accordion towns.

Cagnoni is an Osimo company whose name sits inside many accordions. It was founded in 1946 by Muzio Cagnoni, who, the company says, was born in Stradella, in Lombardy, in 1915, learned accordion making there, and finished his training in Castelfidardo after his family moved. He ran the firm, it says, for more than sixty years.

That biography links Italy’s two accordion towns. Stradella’s industry began with Mariano Dallapè’s factory in 1876; Castelfidardo’s with Paolo Soprani’s workshop in the 1860s. Its founder trained in both.

It is now a broader metalworking company. It describes three divisions — accordion reeds, electrical commutators, and cold blanking of sheet metal for the automotive and appliance markets — and a 2013 trade article reported 62 employees and turnover of €6.3 million for the whole company, after a 1960s expansion with orders from Lenco. It remains family-held, led by the founder’s descendants, at via Oriana Fallaci in Osimo.

Four grades of reed.

In the 1930s, Pinelli writes, the big Soprani firms still made their reeds in-house; the independent reed makers came later. The grade names are shared across the trade: “tipo a mano,” as Voci Armoniche explains, means hand-finished, as distinct from a fully handmade “a mano” reed. Cagnoni’s English specification sheet sets out four grades: Durall, Tipo A Mano Durall Extra, Tipo A Mano and A Mano. All use plates of “Aluminium avional alloy series 2000, hardness 140÷150 hb” and tongues of special steel with a resistance of 2,000 newtons per square millimetre. The first two are aimed at “semi professional musical instruments and folk music”; the tipo a mano and a mano grades are “Professional,” with round-head riveting and tongues “polished thoroughly by hand.” A newer HQ line is described as a new class of handmade reed.

Its customers are less documented than its specifications. Retailers report that the French brand Saltarelle uses Cagnoni reeds across its range, from tipo a mano to Super Durall; we could not confirm this from Saltarelle itself. A US parts dealer sells Cagnoni tipo a mano reed blocks for piano accordions.

Its claims are confident. The company says “Since 1946 Cagnoni has been synonymous with precision,” and that today it is “a leader in the world accordion market.” We found no market-share figure to test that. Its tagline is “Feeling with precision, since 1946,” and it reports a €93,500 grant from the EU-funded Marche regional programme for an industry 4.0 project, including a robotic cell. Brass reeds, it says, are available on special request.

The Castelfidardo supply chain.

Castelfidardo, in the Marche, has made accordions since the nineteenth century, and its own history page records the scale of the boom. Between 1947 and 1953 the town’s accordion exports rose from 57,523 to 192,058, and a town of about 9,000 people employed about 10,000 accordion workers. Seventeen firms went bankrupt between 1960 and 1963.

The post-war years were the town’s golden age. The comune records that nineteen accordion firms were founded in Castelfidardo alone between 1946 and 1948, that some took Hollywood names — Paramount, Universal, MGM, Metropolitan — to sell in America, and that one street, via Marconi, was nicknamed “via dei dollari,” the street of dollars.

Consolidation came early. In July 1946, the Treccani biographical dictionary records, three firms — Settimio Soprani of Castelfidardo, Scandalli of Camerano and Frontalini of Numana — joined to form Farfisa, the “Fabbriche Riunite Fisarmoniche,” though Frontalini soon withdrew.

The decline was long. In 2012 the business paper Il Sole 24 Ore put the peak at 240,000 accordions a year and current output at “non più di 30mila” — no more than 30,000 — between Castelfidardo and neighbouring Recanati. The town says about thirty firms still work there.

Much of the instrument comes from specialists. A March 2000 trade report, quoted by the accordion writer Mario Bruneau, counted 29 accordion firms in the area and found that “only 2 are actually able to produce an entire accordion”; the rest depended on outside companies for components such as buttons and bass mechanisms.

The reeds, which make the sound, come from a handful of makers. A 2021 study in the European Journal of Musicology by Raffaele Pinelli named four in the Marche — Voci Armoniche, Binci, Cagnoni and Artigiana Voci — and found that the Italian reed market had fallen sharply in the 2000s.

The town keeps its history in public. Its international accordion museum grew out of an appeal on the RAI television programme Portobello on 20 February 1981 and opened on 9 May 1981; a 2020 count put its collection at 450 accordions, 9,500 scores and 11,000 recordings.

Castelfidardo is now working toward UNESCO recognition for accordion making: the town says a cataloguing phase ended on 13 September 2025 with eighteen documentation sheets. As far as public sources show, the town has no protected geographical indication for its accordions, although EU rules for craft indications took effect on 1 December 2025.

The trade itself is smaller and richer. Under customs code 9205 90 10, Eurostat records that Italy exported €22.37 million of accordions and similar instruments in 2024 — 9,998 units, about €2,240 each — against 16,905 units in 2007.

Cagnoni is one of the four reed makers Pinelli named — a supplier whose name appears on retailers’ specification lists rather than on the front of the instrument.

Precision first, the instrument second.

Cagnoni’s brand is precision. Its own vocabulary is engineering — hardness ratings, tensile resistance, riveting methods — and its business has grown well beyond accordions into parts for cars and appliances. Yet its founder’s story, from Stradella to Castelfidardo, ties it to the instrument’s two Italian homes. Pinelli’s study adds context for its claims of precision: he found no significant innovation in the Italian reed sector for about sixty years, and patents only rarely used.

For a design guide, Cagnoni shows a component maker speaking in the language of specifications. Compare Voci Armoniche, its Osimo neighbour, and Saltarelle, one of the brands retailers say it supplies. For this guide we use a steel grey and a signal red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no reed or logo is reproduced.

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