IWHO CODE

The Tuscany School of Violin Making has always been aware that a substantial problem of Italian violin making is the imitation of Italian instruments by foreign countries, placed on the low-cost market.  For years, our craftsmen have suffered because of traders that have gained in profit by buying Chinese and Romanian instruments for resale and giving a false impression that they’re Italian.  We made the decision to certify indisputably our instruments produced by the students of our school.  Actual certification is something surprisingly simple, it’s a method which makes our instruments forgery-proof.  It’s rather odd that it wasn’t thought of and implemented before 2015.  In the following pages you can easily understand the method used by us for the first time in the world.  Italian violin makers are aware that the best spruce wood used for the construction plans of classical music stringed instruments comes from the forest in the eastern Alps of our country, especially from region of the Val di Fiemme, it can not come from anywhere else in the world.

Starting from this unique feature, we know that each tree has annual growth rings that vary their thickness and coloration depending on the temperature, the precipitation and the morphological characteristics of the soil.  This forms a specific fingerprint of each piece used in violin making that it reads like a bar code of a product for sale.  We have a business agreement with one of the most prominent sawmills that produce spruce of resonance of the Val di Fiemme lumber, the company called Ciresa.  With this sawmill we have it established that each piece bought from us are numbered on one corner.  With this simple procedure, every master luthier can do his work preserving this corner which shows the number and the specific grain of that piece, at any time the authenticity of where the instrument was built can be verified.  IWHO is a certification issued by every violinmaker and with Ciresa’s numbering system it’s even further proof.
We’ve made the decision to open a collective site of all the instruments made with  this tracking technique.  On this site every violin maker will produce photos of the finished top, with the identification number and a series of at least five photos that testify to the various phases of manual work according to the rules of this art.  This catalog allows at any time, in any location in the world, the ability to check if the instrument in hand is really what its certificate declares it to be.  Go to the website of IWHO and enter the ID number to follow all the phases of construction of the instrument, you’ll receive the decisive proof that it’s not a forgery of other origins.  This method, devised by the School of Violin Making Tuscan is the first global experiment to combat counterfeiting of stringed instruments.