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Artist
Florido Ubaldi
2+ albums
18th centuryitalian
about
Florido Ubaldi was an Italian salterio (baroque psaltery) virtuoso active in the early eighteenth century, remembered less through a well-documented professional career than through a striking contemporary notice that singles him out as an exemplary master of the instrument. The earliest solid biographical foothold comes from Filippo Bonanni’s Gabinetto Armonico (1723), which describes Ubaldi as a priest and citizen of Città di Castello and praises his musicianship on the salterio. In that account, Ubaldi appears not merely as a competent player but as someone associated with technical and musical ambition for the instrument: Bonanni reports that he expanded the salterio by adding many strings, and that he could play it both by plucking and by striking with small sticks, producing rich harmonic effects and arpeggiated textures that recall keyboard sonorities. Whatever else remains uncertain about Ubaldi’s life, this testimony places him clearly within the instrument’s moment of heightened visibility and experimentation in early eighteenth-century Italy. Modern reference and discographic layers often summarise his activity with a floruit dating (commonly given as fl. 1711–c. 1740), reflecting the fact that secure birth and death dates have not been established in the widely accessible literature. His name persists today above all because at least one work continues to circulate under his authorship, typically titled Sinfonia da Salterio col Basso, and because the wider early-