Paolo Antonio Testore

Paolo Antonio Testore (c.1700 – 30 March 1767), Carlo Giuseppe's eighth child and youngest surviving son, was — like his elder brother Carlo Antonio — his father's pupil and successor, and the parish census likewise records him simply as a *Violinaro* from 1736 onward. He married Marianna Bancola and had eleven children, of whom only one, Pietro (b. 17 October 1732), took up violin making. Paolo ...Read More Antonio and his family never left the Testore family home on the Contrada Larga, dying there in 1767; his son Pietro was finally forced to leave the building in 1776 when it was demolished to make way for the Teatro della Canobbiana (later second in importance only to La Scala). A vivid, if unflattering, anecdote survives about Pietro: entrusted with training a widow's gifted young son as a violin maker, he arranged, without the mother's knowledge, to have the boy castrated to preserve his singing voice — a scandal that, once the widow's noble patron intervened, nearly ended Pietro's career at a moment when the practice was already coming under wider scrutiny. Read Less