Mad About the Mandolin

On October 30, 2023, shortly before my sixty-ninth birthday, I stepped into a music store a few minutes from my house, in the southern suburbs of Milan, to buy a mandolin. At first, I thought that I would come away empty-handed. It’s a big store, with long rows of guitars and orchestral instruments on every wall, the floor space taken up by pianos and keyboards. But eventually I spotted them, high in a cobwebby corner: two mandolins—one a folksy flat-back and the other a classical bowl-back. After getting them down with the aid of a ladder, the store assistant had to wipe off the dust. Though Italy was the birthplace of the mandolin, both had been made in China.