A Soprani-trained émigré.

Giulietti was an American accordion company with Italian roots. Luigi Giulietti, from Recanati, a few kilometres from Castelfidardo, trained at the Soprani workshops in Castelfidardo, emigrated to the United States in 1914 — first to Chicago — and founded the Giulietti Accordion Company in New York in 1923, according to the Cotati Accordion Festival and the Italian guitar-history site Fetish Guitars.

When Luigi died in 1950 his son Julio took over, and the firm became Giulietti & Son. Julio, born around 1910, was named an honorary director of the Cotati Accordion Festival in California in 1994, and told it that he had learned reed-making from his mother, and that during the Second World War an officer kept him playing for troops at a base in Los Angeles: “The accordion saved my life.” The 1994 profile gives the company’s address as 3 Cross Street. Julio died in 1996.

Giulietti’s most lasting idea was free bass. Julio promoted a free-bass system marketed in the United States as “Bassetti” — a layout that lets the left hand play single notes rather than only pre-set chords — and the composer John Serry dedicated his 1964 accordion concerto to him as a leading promoter of the instrument.

Designed in New York, built in Italy.

Giulietti accordions were made in Italy. Julio told the Cotati festival that, even in his eighties, he visited Italy at least twice a year to oversee the making of Giulietti-name instruments, and that each took about two hundred hours of work. Production moved from an earlier maker to Zero Sette in Castelfidardo; Fetish Guitars says Giulietti money helped finance Zero Sette’s start.

The company also sold guitars. Zero Sette built JG and Juliett guitars — the initials stand for Julio Giulietti — for Giulietti & Son in the 1960s, according to the guitar historian Michael Wright.

The name survived the company. In 2007 Bugari Armando, which bought Zero Sette, says it also bought “the GIULIETTI brand”; the Seattle maker Petosa now sells a Giulietti range, including the P.48, F-115, M.37, MF.52 and P.72, on its own website. Who legally holds the Giulietti mark today, and which factory builds the current models, we could not confirm. Players associated with the brand, listed in Henry Doktorski’s 2008 book The Giulietti Sound, include Leon Sash, Guy Klucevsek, Joseph Macerollo, William Cosby and Todd Hildreth. In July 2019, the Italian site The Accordionist reported, the singer Loreena McKennitt played a Giulietti from the 1950s or 1960s at a concert in Macerata.

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.

Giulietti’s story is the American end of that chain: a New York company that designed and sold accordions while Castelfidardo built them.

A family name over an Italian workshop.

Giulietti’s brand was a family name in Manhattan and an Italian workshop behind it. Its two founders’ biographies — a Soprani-trained émigré and a son who learned reeds from his mother — gave it authenticity; its free-bass advocacy gave it a cause; its JG guitars show how far an accordion name could stretch in the 1960s. Today the name lives on as a range sold by another family brand.

For a design guide, Giulietti shows a brand defined by its founders rather than its factory. Compare Zero Sette, which built its instruments, and Petosa, which now sells the name. We say plainly that the original company no longer exists. For this guide we use a midnight blue and a silver with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no instrument or logo is reproduced.

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