Hello! My name is Marco Todeschini and I am a luthier specialized in the ukulele making.
Why this job? It’s a story full of serendipity and nice anecdotes
Since I was a little kid my dad taught me how to build small wooden toys.
While in high school, the Math Teacher talked to us about the relationship between mathematics and music: musical intervals, string formula, up to how to design a rudimentary stringed instrument. Taken by the enthusiasm shortly after I built my very first guitar and it was love at first sight: I discovered a passion that led me for the following years to build self-taught instruments and then to leave my job to attend a luthierie school.
I studied 4 years in Milan where I learnt lute and classical guitar traditional building methods. During my studies I happened to need a small instrument to fit in a hand-luggage to take to the United States, a present for my girlfriend who spent a year there. This is when I discovered the ukulele!
After the first one I made a second and a third one, to the point it became a drug and now I cannot stop! This is when Antica Ukuleleria was born.
After my Diploma it was time to get out of the garage where I had been growing my dreams for 10 years. I started looking for a small workshop to settle and I got welcomed by Verona FabLab a fabrication laboratory where innovation has the shape of 3d printers, laser cutters and CNC routers. The combination of the traditional tecniques with the new technologies gave birth to something unexpected.
In the years spent at the Fablab my construction method has evolved a lot by contaminating itself with many techniques that I have slowly managed to use with creativity at the service of lutherie.
In 2021 my wife Sonia and I moved to Corbiolo, a small village close to the Lessina Natural Park, near the mountains in the province of Verona. Here we live and work in our home-workshop.
Since the beginning of Antica Ukuleleria 10 years and about 320 ukuleles have passed so I decided to apply what I have learned so far to the instrument that, at the beginning of everything, made me fall in love with lutherie: the acoustic guitar.
After the first experiments and adjustments (a ukulele and a guitar work in a similar but not the same way), I discovered that the experience made with these small instruments has been very useful for me in creating and optimizing an agile and functional construction method, totally applicable also to acoustic guitars.
I became more and more passionate and convinced to use local wood, I decided to pay homage to the land that has welcomed us in this new phase of our lives. This is how Chitarre Lessinia was born.