Where La Venezia Stands | Its Place in the Benedetto Lineup

Materials chosen for an upper-tier model

Its restrained appearance did not make La Venezia a lesser or simplified instrument.

The model descriptions reproduced in the color section of Making an Archtop Guitar do not speak about every instrument in the same terms. There is a clear difference between the descriptions of the Cremona, Limelite, and La Venezia and those of the Manhattan and Fratello.^[2]

This is not an argument that close-grained wood necessarily sounds better. Nor do I intend to draw a simple line between the appearance of the grain and the quality of the sound.

The Manhattan and Fratello are described as having a “select, aged spruce” top and a “select, aged flamed maple” back. Their necks are “matching flamed maple.” The descriptions are nearly identical.

For the Limelite and La Venezia, the top is “very select,” “aged,” and “close-grained,” while the back is “very select,” “aged,” and “highly flamed.” In the La Venezia entry, both the top and back are also expressly identified as European.

The Cremona goes further still: “the finest, select, aged European cello woods,” with the top and back described as handcarved and finely tuned.

This alone is not enough to prove that the workshop maintained three formally defined grades of wood. Still, these descriptions appear side by side, in the same book and in the same format. It is difficult to dismiss the changes in wording as accidental.

At the time the book was published, Benedetto was distinguishing the models not only by ornament, but also by the selection of materials.

The Limelite and La Venezia make the most revealing pair.

Both use “very select” woods. The Limelite, however, carries inlay on the fingerboard, fingerrest, and tailpiece, together with fine-lined binding throughout. La Venezia heads in the opposite direction: “No body binding,” “No fingerrest,” and “No pickup.”

Those specifications were not necessarily fixed at the time of order. The Benedetto logbook entry for the 1995 guitar #36495 includes the notation “S6.” Since the S-6 is a floating pickup mounted to the fingerrest, this guitar would also have required a fingerrest. “No fingerrest” and “No pickup” were therefore the model’s basic specification, not conditions that could never be changed. A customer could order La Venezia with a pickup.

The two models were close in their choice of wood, yet almost opposites in the way that wood was presented.

La Venezia was not stripped of ornament simply to make it cheaper.

The important choices were not compromised; the rest was taken away.

That is the first point to keep in mind.

Expensive without becoming ornate

On a traditional high-end archtop, a higher price usually brings more of something.

The binding becomes more elaborate, the inlay more extensive, and decoration appears on the headstock as well. Gibson’s upper models make this hierarchy particularly easy to see. Benedetto’s Cremona belongs, broadly speaking, to the same tradition.

La Venezia does not.

It has no body binding, and its fingerboard decoration is restrained. As the price rises, the visible appointments diminish rather than multiply.

The book lists “No body binding,” “No fingerrest,” and “No pickup” for La Venezia. The Manhattan, by contrast, is bound throughout in traditional black and white and fitted with a narrow fingerrest.

La Venezia uses more selectively chosen wood while showing less on the surface. The unusual nature of the model is evident even from these two specification entries.

This reversal is precisely what makes La Venezia difficult to explain as a simple step in a price hierarchy.

Benedetto after 1982

The Benedetto Guitars Archives identifies 1982 as a turning point.

From around that time, Bob Benedetto began removing what he regarded as unnecessary ornament—binding, inlay, and the like—and turned his attention more directly toward the sound of the archtop itself. The archive states that this “less is more” approach led to La Venezia, La Cremona Azzurra, and the Renaissance Series.^[3]

I discussed the significance of 1982 in an earlier article, “Benedetto Before the Manhattan”. It is a detail that cannot be ignored when considering the origins of La Venezia.

Even so, it would be premature to place La Venezia and the Renaissance Series in a single, direct line of development. The archive says that they grew from the same idea; it does not say that one passed through La Venezia on the way to the Renaissance Series.

They share a point of departure, but for now it is safer to see them as separate branches. I have examined the Renaissance Series in more detail in this article.

Going beyond wood binding

The move toward less ornament was not, of course, unique to Benedetto.

From the mid-1980s onward, Jimmy D’Aquisto increasingly replaced the metal and plastic parts of the traditional archtop with wood.

In its description of the 1989 Avant Garde made for Jim Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art also points to D’Aquisto’s removal of the celluloid binding traditionally used on the body, fingerboard, and headstock.^[4]

That does not mean, however, that every visual border disappeared. A wooden perimeter remains visible around the body of the Avant Garde.

D’Aquisto’s approach was to replace plastic with wood and metal with wood, reducing excess ornament while bringing as much of the instrument as possible into a coherent wooden whole.

Wood binding eventually became a familiar sight among handmade archtops.

This is where La Venezia begins to look different.

If plastic binding was undesirable, it could simply be replaced with wood. Many builders did exactly that.

La Venezia went a step further.

Instead of substituting wood binding, it removed the binding itself.

That does not mean it was easier to build.

When a friend commissioned a 16-inch Artisan Custom from Buscarino, John Buscarino himself made it clear that the unbound construction required more work, not less. With nothing to conceal the joint, the fit between the top and sides—and the finish around the entire perimeter—remains fully exposed.

On that Artisan 16″ Custom, at least, the lack of binding was not a labor-saving measure. It looks as though something has been omitted, but it leaves the maker nowhere to hide.

Benedetto’s 2010 price list likewise goes out of its way to describe La Venezia as “No binding (violin-like).” This was not a casual omission of a part that could be done without.^[5]

The question was not what else could be added, but how much could be removed before it ceased to be a Benedetto.

The guitar in these photographs is not a La Venezia. It is a 2006 Benedetto 16″ Custom that I commissioned directly from Bob. What matters here is not the model-specific design, but the treatment of the top edge.

It is more than the absence of a white or black line. Because no separate material divides the top from the sides, the swell of the arch falls directly into the side. Without an outline around it, the body reads as a continuous form.

This is not merely one less component. That uninterrupted appearance is part of what La Venezia was about.

Was it necessary to remove that much?

This is also where I do not entirely agree with Benedetto.

Binding is not purely decorative. It serves the very practical purpose of protecting the outer edges of the top and back.

An archtop soundboard is generally made from a comparatively soft conifer such as spruce. The wood is already vulnerable to dents and scratches, and the outer edge is exactly where the guitar may be knocked while being taken in or out of its case, carried, or played.

It is a place one might especially want to protect. La Venezia removes that protection.

There is boldness in the decision, but also a certain vulnerability.

Wood binding would have been another option. It could have protected the perimeter without introducing a non-wood material.

La Venezia rejected even that solution.

I should add that I am hardly in a position to sound too superior about this. I commissioned an unbound Benedetto from Bob himself. My own 2006 Benedetto 16″ Custom has no binding either.

Even so, I now believe a guitar is better off with binding.

Nor am I about to insist that “instruments are meant to be played, not displayed.” This site has long taken the rather unapologetic position that an instrument can be played, looked at, and appreciated as an object in its own right. I certainly do all three.

Still, for most people a guitar is taken from its case, held, played, and put away again. For a working player, travel must be added to that list.

Removing the protection from the perimeter therefore carries a real practical cost.

La Venezia accepted that cost in order to achieve its particular appearance.

One might say that this is precisely why it is beautiful. I am not convinced, however, that the choice was unconditionally the right one.

Why it no longer looks so unusual

There is one more point to remember when looking at La Venezia today.

Its seamless appearance no longer seems quite as rare as it once did.

Bob Benedetto published Making an Archtop Guitar and later made his methods remarkably accessible through his instructional video. Since then, Benedetto-influenced archtops have appeared around the world.

Even at companies such as Eastman, where multiple craftspeople work at a scale different from that of the individual maker, there is no shortage of instruments whose appearance reflects Benedetto’s influence.

For me, however, the main reason La Venezia’s seamless form no longer feels quite so startling is probably Dale Unger.

Unger began studying with Bob Benedetto in 1993 and built archtops alongside him for several years. He later brought what he had learned, together with his own ideas, into American Archtop.^[6]

Some American Legend guitars have no binding on either the body or the neck. A sales description for a 2004 example expressly calls the relevant joints “entirely free of binding.”^[7]

When someone who worked so closely with Bob continued to make guitars of this kind, and one has seen them for years, it is only natural for the initial surprise of La Venezia’s appearance to fade. At least, that has been my experience.

This does not diminish La Venezia.

Rather, the spread of similarly conceived guitars has made it harder to see just how unusual the model looked when it first appeared.

Where La Venezia stands

Let us return to the Benedetto lineup.

The Manhattan long occupied the center of the range as Benedetto’s representative 17-inch archtop. The Cremona took the opposite course, sparing little in its materials, ornament, or execution.

Then what was La Venezia?

It cost more than the Manhattan or Fratello, and its materials were more selectively chosen. Yet instead of becoming more ornate, it allowed the nonessential to disappear.

In the end, it even removed the binding that might otherwise have been retained in wood.

Seen this way, La Venezia appears to have grown from an unusual question within Benedetto’s work.

It was the opposite of the Cremona’s way of expressing the full extent of what Benedetto could do.

Remove one thing, then another. What remains?

The arch. The selection of the wood. The way that wood is allowed to show. The form of the instrument as a whole.

Would those things alone be enough to make the guitar unmistakably a Benedetto?

La Venezia may have been an attempt to answer that question in the form of a single instrument.

I find the attempt deeply interesting. At the same time, I still have doubts about whether removing the binding was the best choice for the guitar as an instrument.

Once that doubt is included, La Venezia becomes more than simply “an upper-tier Benedetto.”

It may have been another kind of summit: an attempt to discover how far a Benedetto could be reduced and still remain a Benedetto.