Lucio Antonio Carbone
Lucio Antonio Carbone was born in Milan in 1959 and is one of Italy's most respected self-taught luthiers. He built his very first guitar in 1976, purely as a hobby, while still a teenager. In the early 1980s, he abandoned his studies in physics to devote himself fully to his true passion: the construction of fine stringed instruments. He officially established himself as a luthier in 1983, and in 1989, at the age of thirty, opened his own workshop and small shop in Milan, located in Via Carlo Goldoni 77, where he also sold guitars, strings, and accessories.
In his early professional years, Carbone was drawn to the American tradition of steel-string guitar making. A pivotal shift occurred in 1986, when he turned his attention to classical guitar construction — a craft that would become the defining focus of his career. Over the decades, his exceptional skills attracted the attention of several prominent brands, who entrusted his workshop with their customer service and repair work. His extensive experience restoring 19th- and 20th-century instruments has given him an unusually deep knowledge of historical construction methods, materials, and techniques, knowledge he generously shares through workshops, courses, and contributions to specialized publications. In 2018, Carbone made the decision to focus exclusively on guitar making.
Carbone's instruments draw their primary inspiration from the traditional Spanish school of Antonio de Torres and the German tradition of Hermann Hauser, balanced by the elegance of voice and dynamic equilibrium that defines those legendary masters. Among his most acclaimed works are his exquisite replicas of historic Torres guitars — most notably his recreations of second-epoch Torres instruments, where the accuracy of color, texture, and patina is so convincing that even a trained eye can struggle to recognize them as new. Carbone goes so far as to transfer subtle "false cracks" onto the back and sides and to create facsimiles of the original labels, while always clearly branding his name inside the guitar and on the back of the headstock to make plain that these are tributes, never plagiarisms.
Tonewood selection is at the heart of Carbone's craft. He works only with woods aged for twenty years or longer, and finishes his instruments in the classical manner using French polish or shellac. He has also created a special model called "La Italica," presented at the 2023 Roma Guitar Expo, which pays homage to the Italian guitar-making tradition of the transitional period when makers such as Gallinotti, Giulietti, and Mozzani began incorporating Spanish elements while maintaining a distinctly Italian aesthetic. Carbone's guitars are renowned for their deep, mysterious basses, brilliant trebles, balance, sustain, and refined Spanish nuance — a true embodiment of the Italian gift for coupling lyricism with power and projection.
