A brother’s own workshop.

Settimio Soprani was the brother of Paolo Soprani, whose workshop founded Castelfidardo’s accordion industry. Treccani gives Paolo’s dates as 1844 to 1918; his company dates its story to 1863 and says he opened a workshop in 1864. The Treccani biographical dictionary records that “Nel 1885 Settimio aveva lasciato l’opificio di famiglia per aprire un proprio laboratorio, sempre a Castelfidardo” — in 1885 he left the family workshop to open his own, also in Castelfidardo. Some other sources date his independence to 1872.

His firm grew quickly. Italian Wikipedia says that by 1910 it had overtaken his brother’s in output, and the comune’s history records that in the 1911 census Settimio’s firm employed 30 workers to Paolo’s 24 — a reversal in a town where Paolo’s workshop had come first.

It stayed in the family. Treccani says the firm passed in 1916 to Settimio’s son Mario, who brought in new partners shortly before the Second World War and died in 1941. Settimio’s grandson, Paolo Settimio Soprani — born in Recanati in 1913 and named after both his grandfather and his great-uncle — then led it into the 1946 merger that created Farfisa.

From merger to revival.

Inside Farfisa the name lived on as an accordion brand. A 1953 chromolithograph poster by Giovanni Mingozzi, “Settimio Soprani nota musicale con fisarmonica” — a musical note with an accordion — signed “Studio Mingozzi – Bologna,” is held by the Museo Nazionale Collezione Salce in Treviso, and shows how the brand presented itself in that decade.

Paolo Settimio Soprani resigned from Farfisa in 1970, over disagreements about how it was run, and died in Jesi in 1989, Treccani records. When Paolo Bontempi bought Farfisa in 1984, a trade report says, the Settimio Soprani accordion brand went with it, together with Scandalli, Mozzani guitars and Furstein pianos.

The name has since been revived by a different company. Maxim’s Group of Castelfidardo writes that “Il primo ad essere registrato è il nome SETTIMIO SOPRANI nel 2006” — the first name it registered was Settimio Soprani, in 2006 — and that it relaunched the brand by rebuilding the ARTIST VI model. It has since registered other historic names, including Sonola in 2008 and Crucianelli and Frontalini in 2009. The company says the ARTIST VI is recognised among the best of the last 150 years; we report that as its claim, along with its statements that it holds five patents and has an exclusive agreement with what it calls the largest importer in America.

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.

Settimio Soprani’s story runs through that whole history: a brother’s workshop, a boom-era leader, a founding partner of Farfisa and, now, a name revived by a new firm.

A musical note beside an accordion.

Settimio Soprani’s brand is a family name split from a more famous one. For a century it has had to distinguish itself from Paolo Soprani — by output in 1910, by merger in 1946, by revival in 2006. Its 1953 poster, a musical note beside an accordion, is a simple and confident mark of that era.

For a design guide, Settimio Soprani shows how a historic name can be bought, merged and revived by people outside the founding family. Compare Paolo Soprani, the brother’s firm, and Farfisa, the merger it helped form. We say plainly that today’s brand is a 2006 revival, not the family firm. For this guide we use a bottle green and an old gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no instrument or logo is reproduced.

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