Domenico Scarlatti & Giovanni Zamboni 18th C. Italian Lute Music Lutes are very fragile instruments and that is why so few instruments have survived until today.The earliest example of lutemaking that we have was the famous school of Bologna. The majority of the builders were German. The old Bologna lutes have a legendary reputation. They date from about 1500 (builders among others Laux and Sigismund Maler) to at least 1700. Around 1600 other builders became famous, Tieffenbrucker in Padua, Sellas in Venice and Buechenberg in Rome. They built archlutes,theorboes and chitarroni. In the seventeenth century the lute was an important continuo instrument, for use in ensembles. In the second half of the sixteenth century a larger form of the lute a theorbo had been developed. This instrument had, compared to the lute, a longer stringlength and still longer bass strings. The archlute is a member of the same family, tuned as a lute. Due to the longer stringlength of the archlute (which meant wider spaced frets), it was difficult to perform fast fingered sections and that is the reason why there is not much solomusic for the archlute. The instrument had more volume and depth than the lute so its most important task till the end of the eighteenth century was song accompaniment and continuo playing. Lute music was notated from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards in the form of tablature. Numbers were used in Italy and letters in other countries. They indicate where and on which coarse each note has to be played. The rhythm of the piece was indicated as well as ornaments. Italy was the most important producer of printed lutebooks during the sixteenth century.The golden age of lute music was at the beginning of the seventeenth century; many great collections were published all over Europe.