Paolo Bodini, the museum's director of violin-making and president of the international Friends of Stradivari network, said the focus and content of the museum made it a one-off. "There are very beautiful collections of Cremonese violins around the world – in London, for example, at the Royal Academy of Music … but nothing of this kind. Most of these collections are located in more generalist museums so they're … kind of lost amid the huge amount of things that these museums exhibit," he said.
"We have focused on and put a lot of effort into trying to describe the history behind it – not only the object, but how the violin came to life in the 16th century, how it developed through the decades and centuries, and what is behind that. If you are able to see the violins being made, you can see the master violin-maker at work … you can understand more when you see the masterpiece. So in this way the museum is absolutely unique."
At a viewing for journalists on Thursday, before the Cremona-born violinist Antonio De Lorenzi played excerpts from Bach and Verdi on the nearly 300-year-old Stradivarius, Arvedi said that although he did not play the violin or collect them, he saw in their playing a "spirituality" that was second to none.
His love and accompanying funds have been met with gratitude in the artistic circles of a country in which public funding of the cultural sector has been badly hit in the ongoing recession. "Cremona has always maintained something [of its heritage]," said Virginia Villa, director of the Violin Museum. "But certainly to get a project of this kind under way it needed someone who believed in it to lend a hand financially.
"The public authorities at the moment are not able to do this on their own. Today the municipality is having trouble repairing the roads and the state is having problems looking after the health service, the hospitals. There is an economic crisis which means obviously that the priorities are of a social nature. But in my opinion this is also a social priority. Because it feeds the desire for culture in all people."
• This article was amended on 10 September 2013 to correct a reference to the Royal Academy of Music, from the Royal Academy of Arts.