In 1986, the Executive Board and some musicians bravely decided to reconstruct the birth and development of our Association from the first years. Unfortunately the documents that could have helped us during the enterprise had all been turned into mud by the raging water of the river Oglio, which invaded the archives of the SEDE of the band (the basements of the old primary school), during the flooding of 1960. The only datum about the birth of the Association that we had was based more on tradition than on history, and it attributed the beginning of this musical association to two brothers, Isidoro and Massimiliano Caprinali, who gathered the first musicians in about 1888. Our target was to find documents to prove this fact for sure, for it was only an oral tradition passed on from musician to musician until 1919.
This search took us to the archives of the parishes of all the neighbouring towns, in the hope of written testimonies of performances of the band during some fairs; we looked on the boards of the oldest bands of our province, where we could have found some link to our won band due to friendhsips between conductors or members, cultural exchanges, competitions or performances held together…; we went to the Biblioteca Queriniana in Brescia and we immersed in the pages of the most famous newspapers of the years between 1800 and 1900: “Il Cittadino di Brescia” (catholic review) and “La Provincia di Brescia” (the liberal antagonist); we even went looking for some descendant of the Caprinali family tree … Unfortunately we didn’t find anything sure from all this, and from the few documents we had we could only formulate hypothesis. We had the intuition that before 1888, and maybe even from the early 1850s, was there a group of players, perhaps too small to be call “musica” (the term used in those years); perhaps it wasn’t very well organised and it kept on being formed, ending, being formed again, therefore not becoming known enough to be talked of on newspapers and in Brescia, where the “Musica di Darfo” is first named only in the first years of 1900. The confirmation that our intuitions were valid came in 1993, when the historian Marino Anesa, famous scholar of the world of Italian wind bands, found an important document at the State Archive of Bergamo during his researches for the draft of a work on original scores for bands from 1800 to 1945. It was the “General regulations for the music society of Darfo”, dated July, 30th, 1853. At last we had found what we had always missed during our years of research, because our attention was wrongly orientated on the archives of Brescia and not on those of Bergamo. It was clear that it was our band the document talked of, because of one of the names of the fellow founders: Gioacchino Caprinali, the father of Isidoro and Massimiliano, until then thought to be the first founders and leaders of our Association.