Where Italy meets Brazil: Guitarist Diego Salvetti comes to the islands

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, February 25, 2026

By Darrell Kirk

Staff reporter

When Diego Salvetti picks up his eight-string guitar, three musical worlds — classical, Italian melody, Brazilian rhythm, Spanish flamenco — converge into a single unmistakable voice. Local audiences will experience that fusion when Salvetti performs at the San Juan Community Theatre on Saturday, Feb. 28, at 7:30 p.m., and at Orcas Center on Sunday, March 1, at 7 p.m.

Salvetti grew up in Bergamo, in northern Italy, in a household saturated with music. His father played accordion late into the evenings. An older brother was a professional musician. By 11, Salvetti had won first prize at the 13th National Guitar Competition of Genova, Italy, the “Pasquale Taraffo.”

After earning his master’s degree in Italy, his classical guitar teacher introduced him to Brazilian and Latin American music, and something shifted. In 2015, Salvetti traveled to Brazil, where he met his future wife. He returned to Italy, and together they made the move back to Brazil permanently.

Brazil changed not just where he lived, but how he heard music.

“When I came to Brazil, I discovered music as a game,” he told The Islands’ Sounder through his interpreter. “As an experiment of sound. As having the audacity to do something different.”

European musicians, he observed, are often constrained by academic tradition. Brazilians invent freely — and that freedom was exactly what he was hungry for.

The result of those years is what Salvetti calls simply a “crossover.” The question he once wrestled with — do I play flamenco, classical or Brazilian? — resolved itself through composition. By writing his own music, he no longer had to choose.

Salvetti’s deepest ambition as a performer is straightforward: He wants audiences to walk out humming a song. That singable thread runs through all his work, even as Brazilian rhythms pulse beneath it and flamenco technique sharpens every note.

He plays an eight-string guitar — two extra bass strings that widen his dynamic range dramatically. He believes it represents the future of classical guitar.

San Juan resident Alex MacKnight, originally from Brazil, has spent the past two years working to bring his close friend Salvetti to the islands. This will be Salvetti’s first time in the San Juans. He has a message for those who come out: “If the people of the San Juan Islands want to experience a new musical journey that combines so many rhythms — something you have never heard before, that is at the same time explosive, sweet, and romantic — that’s what I bring to you.”