A few weeks ago I had a phone call from an antique dealer who told me about a mandolin he had acquired in need of a major restoration. I wasn't quite sure if he was trying to sell it to me or get me to restore it for him, but I went to have a look at it anyway. It was a very interesting mandolin, but in need of a lot of work. He offered it to me at a most attractive price, too good to turn down, so I have been looking at it ever since and planning an approach to restoring it.
It is a most interesting mandolin. The label, somewhat chewed away, has the name of Pietro Torrello of Naples, but with no date readable. The name is unusual and none of my bowlback enthusiast friends have come across it before.
The mandolin itself is a fairly standard Neapolitan type of construction, but the inlet work on the fingerboard and head is rather unusual, as I have not come across another Neapolitan mandolin of this period (1900 plus or minus a decade) with this delicate art nouveau style of inlay.
The body has 33 rosewood ribs, the neck is veneered in ebony as is the head. The soundboard is spruce , edged with very fine BW purfling and bound with strips of tortoiseshell, most of which is missing. There is a strip of tulipwood (or is it satinwood?) veneer below the tortoise binding, and chunks of that have come away as well. Under the tailpiece is a strip of mother-of-pearl. The scratchplate is tortoise with ivory anMop and abalone inlay, with some very delicate engraving on the female figure in the middle. The rosette is sections of engraved MoP. The fingerboard is a base of ebony, with most of the surface made of pieces of tortoiseshell, inlayed with ivory and MoP and cut for solid 1mm wide frets. Some of the tortoise segments and the frets are missing as well. The ebony fingerboard has been in a shallow U shape, so there is a solid wall on each side with the rectangular tortoise blocks in the middle. The annoying this is that the fingerboard gets thinner towards the nut and the fret slots have been cut right through, which will make taking the finger off rather more tricky. I suspect I will need to attach it to an ebony veneer to rebuild it.
The soundboard is remarkably intact, with none of the usual warping around the soundhole, but the real problem is that the ribs have almost entirely come away from the neckblock and the neck is severely out of line.
The first thing I am going to do is get the fretboard off and re-build that. I have found an old tortoise bracelet, which should be sufficient for the missing bits of fretboard. I have a few old ivory piano keys and plenty of MoP for the inlay. Once I can get the neck back in line with the top of the soundboard the ribs can be re-attached to the neck and all the little bits of edging and binding regaled or replaced. I suspect the soundboard will have to come off at some point, so it can be firmly glued to the neck black as well. The whole thing is, of course, a CITES nightmare, but it is such a beautiful instrument that deserves a little (probably a lot) of TLC.
