'Alemanda' by Niccoló Ceccherini (active ca. 1700) performed by Alex Timmerman on the Mandolino, the oldest scion of in the Mandolin family. This music for Mandolino by Ceccherini is found in a manuscript dated 1703 compiled by a certain Signor Matteo Caccini with the title 'Libro per la Mandola'. The manuscript is now preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale (Rés. Vmb.ms.9) in Paris, France. A modern type setting of this music is found in the wonderful book ‘The early Mandolin’ written by James Tyler and Paul Sparks published in England by Clarendon Press, Oxford (1989). The Mandolino with its double trings of lamb gut is of Italian origin. The first time the name ‘Mandolino’ (as a diminutive of the ‘Mandol[l]a’, its somewhat bigger sister instrument, comes from written sources of the last quarter of the 17th Century. It is therefore the first mandolin kind to be named as such and that gives weight to the idea that it can be seen as the ancestor of...