Links
Sites outside this museum that carry real material on the ocarina and its history: what each one holds, and why it is worth your time.
These are sites the museum has read and drawn on. It is a record of where the evidence is, not an endorsement of anyone’s work or wares, and it is short on purpose: a site earns a place here by holding something about the ocarina or its history that cannot be found elsewhere. Shops are not listed.
Where a collection has a page for its ocarinas, that page is linked rather than the front door. A link to what a collection actually holds is more use than a link to an institution.
Jack Campin
The largest single treatment of the ocarina on the open web: some fourteen thousand words, from Donati in 1853 through fourteen sub-types to the physics of the instrument and its appearances in literature. Last revised in 2016.
The reason to go there is the primary material. Campin has scanned twenty PDFs of two publications issued by Signor Mezzetti around 1900 — Walter Wyatt’s Tonic Sol-Fa Instructor for Mezzetti’s Ocarina in thirteen parts, and his polka Mabel for two ocarinas and piano in seven — along with the 1926 Compton Polyphone patent and an 1890 report in The Scotsman of a Mezzetti concert in Edinburgh. These exist in very few other places.
ocarina.it
A history of the Budrio ocarina by Fabio Menaglio, who makes ocarinas in Budrio today. In Italian.
Read it as one source rather than as several. Much of what circulates in English about the Budrio succession — the dates for Vicinelli, Cesari’s workshop, Mignani’s years — traces back to this page. It is close to the material and careful with dates, and the museum relies on it; but where two accounts agree because one copied the other, that is not corroboration.
The Ocarina Network
The forum where ocarina players and makers have talked to each other for years: reviews of instruments, threads about makers who have since disappeared, and discussion of fingering systems in more detail than anywhere else. Several questions this museum has answered began as a thread there.
Fondazione Carisbo
digital.fondazionecarisbo.it — records matching “ocarine”
Six catalogued ocarinas from Bologna’s Collezione Tagliavini, photographed, measured and dated, each summarizing a printed catalog entry. They include a trio by Emilio Cesari made in Sanremo about 1954, two of his sopranino “ocarinton” instruments with tuning stoppers, three ocarinas by Guido Chiesa about 1955, and instruments by Arrigo Mignani, Antonio Canella of Ferrara and Giorgio Pacchioni.
Dated physical objects with stamps recorded are exactly what the written histories of Budrio lack, which is why this is linked and not merely read.
Something missing, or a link gone stale? Please write to theocarinamuseum@gmail.com. If your site is listed and you would rather it were not, say so and it comes down; no reason needed.