Born in Rome in 1885, Simone Sacconi approached violin making at a young age, while also studying sculpture and decoration. He entered as an apprentice in Giuseppe Rossi's workshop in 1903, but the most important influence on him undoubtedly came from Giuseppe Fiorini, for whom he worked after the Bolognese master's returned to Italy in 1923.
Already in the 1920s, Sacconi was highly esteemed as a great copyist of classical instruments and this allowed him to obtain a job in the firm of Emil Herrmann, first in Berlin and from 1931 in New York City. In 1951, together with his pupil Dario D'Attili, Sacconi entered the Wurlizter company as its director of restoration and expert. In addition to being considered the founder of the modern school of violin repair, Sacconi trained a large number of luthiers and restorers and worked on an impressive number of Italian masterpieces. He passed on the enormous knowledge thus acquired into his seminal book "The secrets of Stradivari", published in 1972, that formed the basis on which subsequent generations of luthiers from many parts of the world were trained.
In the instruments he made, which are quite rare, Sacconi showed a complete mastery of the style and techniques used by the great Cremonese masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in particular Antonio Stradivari, whether his instruments were new or antiqued.
